Salary: £84,080
Role duration: Permanent (37.5 hours per week)
Location: London, UK (Hybrid – 50% office attendance)
Purpose – what you will be achieving:
The Head of Strategy and Planning provides organisation-wide leadership on strategic thinking, prioritisation, and planning. The role is responsible for developing and maintaining the Academy’s strategic framework and planning processes, ensuring that strategic ambitions are clear, evidence-based, affordable, and deliverable.
Working in close partnership with the Chief Operating Officer and senior leaders, the postholder supports the organisation to make informed choices, manage trade-offs, and focus resources where they will have the greatest impact. The role does not hold responsibility for day-to-day operations, but instead enables effective delivery through strong planning, insight, and performance frameworks.
About the role – what you will be doing:
1. Strategic Direction
Lead the development and stewardship of a bold, coherent strategy that positions AMS as an influential voice across both UK and global medical science.
Design and embed organisation‑wide strategic and business planning processes, enabling clear prioritisation, coordinated action and disciplined alignment across all directorates.
Integrate domestic and international priorities seamlessly into the Academy’s strategic framework, ensuring AMS shapes — and is shaped by — both UK and global developments.
Facilitate high‑quality strategic conversations with senior leaders, bringing structure, creativity, evidence and options to complex organisational decisions.
2. Whole‑System Partnerships, Influence and Strategic Engagement
Build and nurture influential partnerships across the entire health, science, research and innovation ecosystem, including government, funders, industry, academia, learned societies, the NHS, international bodies and philanthropic organisations.
Maintain a deep, organisation‑wide understanding of the Academy’s stakeholder landscape, ensuring strategic clarity about who our key partners are, what they value, and how AMS can work with them most effectively.
Enhance AMS’s role as a convener and connector, identifying opportunities for cross‑sector collaboration, joint influence and shared system impact across the UK and globally.
Act as a visible strategic ambassador, representing AMS’s priorities externally and ensuring strategic intelligence flows back into organisational decision‑making.
3. Governance Leadership and Strategic Decision Infrastructure
Oversee all governance functions for the Academy, ensuring that Council and its committees are supported to operate effectively, efficiently and strategically.
Ensure the right business goes to Council at the right time, leading your team to manage forward plans, agenda setting, and the sequencing of decisions so that governance bodies can provide true strategic oversight.
Oversee the preparation of high‑quality papers and briefings that support rigorous, insight‑driven decision‑making by Council, committees and the Executive.
Strengthen governance as a strategic asset, ensuring that Board and committee structures, cycles and information flows enable clarity, accountability and long‑term organisational stewardship.
4. Planning
Lead a high‑performing planning function that provides cross‑Academy visibility, assurance and coordination of major strategic programmes.
Embed consistent project, programme and portfolio management standards, ensuring strategic work is well‑sequenced, risk‑managed and aligned to organisational priorities.
Produce insightful, action‑oriented reporting for the Executive and Council that supports confident oversight and timely decision‑making.
5. Strategic Funding and Resource Alignment
Build strategic relationships with current and potential funders, identifying where aligned investment can accelerate AMS’s mission and shared system goals.
Secure funding, shaping compelling, strategic propositions that reflect both organisational priorities and funder interests.
Work closely with Finance and Fundraising to ensure strategic plans are supported by sustainable income models and clear long‑term financial assumptions.
Identify funding gaps, capacity constraints and resourcing risks, enabling informed choices by the Executive and Council.
6. Horizon Scanning, Foresight & External Context
Monitor and interpret major external developments — scientific, policy, geopolitical, funding, regulatory and technological — across the UK and internationally.
Ensure the Academy’s strategy is globally informed and forward‑looking, enabling AMS to anticipate change, seize emerging opportunities and mitigate strategic risks.
Translate horizon scanning into actionable strategic insight, equipping leaders and governance bodies with the intelligence needed to steer the organisation confidently.
7. Leadership, Organisational Alignment and Executive Support
Lead and develop your team, ensuring strategic planning, international insight, planning, governance support and the CEO’s office operate as a cohesive, high‑performing unit.
Act as a strategic partner to directors and colleagues across the Academy, supporting alignment across directorates while preserving operational accountability.
Champion strategic discipline, prioritisation and organisational focus, ensuring the Academy remains aligned around the work that matters most.
Closing date for completed applications is 2pm on 7th September 2026
Interviews will likely be held online on the week commencing 14th September 2026
Requirements
Strategic leader with substantial experience setting organisational direction and running effective strategic and business planning.
Proven ability to build influential external partnerships across government, funders, industry, academia, NHS bodies and international organisations, acting as a credible ambassador and convener.
Skilled at governance and decision‑making support, including shaping agendas, preparing high‑quality papers and enabling effective Board/committee oversight.
Strong analytical judgement, able to synthesise complex evidence, assess risk and present clear strategic options.
Experience overseeing planning or programme functions, ensuring aligned, well‑sequenced and risk‑managed delivery.
Financially literate, with the ability to align resources with strategic priorities and engage funders.
Excellent communicator and collaborator, able to influence senior leaders and lead high‑performing teams.
Benefits
We offer a competitive and evolving benefits package designed to support your wellbeing, development and work–life balance, including:
A range of enhanced benefits become available once you’ve completed your probation period
We are the independent body in the UK representing the diversity of medical science. Our mission is to advance biomedical and health research and its translation into benefits for society.
We are working to secure a future in which:
- UK and global health is improved by the best research.
- UK leads the world in biomedical and health research, and is renowned for the quality of its research outputs, talent and collaborations.
- Independent, high quality medical science advice informs the decisions that affect society.
- More people have a say in the future of health and research.
Visit our website for more information about our policy work, career development events, mentoring scheme for post-doctoral biomedical and health researchers, and more.
