Senior Specialist, Monitoring and Evaluation , EPIC

Department

EPIC - AQLI

About the Department

The University of Chicago Institute for Climate and Sustainable Growth (ICSG) is a groundbreaking effort uniting faculty from across the university to advance society’s understanding of our energy and climate future. The Institute combines faculty insights in energy markets and policy, climate systems engineering, and energy technology to produce world-changing ideas while also investing in the next generation of energy and climate thinkers, leaders, and innovators through novel educational programs.

Job Summary

The Senior Monitoring and Evaluation Specialist, EPIC Air Quality Fund, will report to the Director of the Clean Air Program at the Institute, Christa Hasenkopf. The position will work closely with leadership and staff at the EPIC Clean Air Program, Air Quality Life Index, along with other programs.

The Senior Monitoring and Evaluation Specialist, EPIC Air Quality Fund, will lead efforts to refine and implement a system to measure progress of the EPIC Air Quality Fund and its awardees to drive clean air action with open air quality data. This work includes doing research and tracking Awardee progress as measured by the EPIC Air Quality Fund’s existing Milestone Criteria. It also includes devising potentially new metrics to include in these criteria. This position also requires communicating these criteria and the aggregate fund progress in public channels. It is anticipated this role will require frequent, deep engagement with Awardees.

Responsibilities

• Through research and awardee engagement, determines baseline values for pre-existing EPIC AQ Fund Milestone Criteria.
• Sets up systems to chronicle and communicate progress in the current and subsequent years through public and donor channels, including building a transparent method for the Fund’s progress to be assessed.
• Devises additional baseline values to build on top of the Fund’s milestone criteria that can be directly measured/tracked from awardees and implemented in 2025 and 2026 that help gauge success.
• Devises future program-wide new milestone criteria to augment or replace existing milestone criteria by December 2025.
• Explores and openly/publicly documents creative approaches for country/awardee-specific or program to monitor and evaluate progress for clean air policy/cleaner air, possibly helping explore initial partnerships to realize these opportunities.
• Writes findings of progress, describing our monitoring and evaluation processes, in relevant outlets and to donors.
• Thinks through, and at times, executes creative approaches to transparently measuring global progress of the program, as well as possible ways for individual grantees to measure success in their specific country contexts.
• Supports the EPIC AQ Fund Team during ‘all hands on deck’ activities, such as advertising open applications, processing applications, etc.
• Interacts with faculty, researchers and staff for committee work or information.
• Uses moderate/solid understanding and experience to administer the delivery of services to program participants and/or beneficiaries.
• Sets and communicates program priorities and performance standards and assesses operations using these criteria. Plans and conducts quality assurance reviews and recommends changes as appropriate.
• Performs other related work as needed.

Minimum Qualifications

Education:

Minimum requirements include a college or university degree in related field.

Work Experience:

Minimum requirements include knowledge and skills developed through 2-5 years of work experience in a related job discipline.

Certifications:

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Preferred Qualifications

Education:

• Bachelor’s degree in a related field.
• Master’s degree in related field.

Experience:

• Three or more years of experience in air quality or other environmentally-related field and/or strong background in monitoring and evaluation techniques.

Technical Skills or Knowledge:

• Proficiency with MS Office (Word, Excel, PowerPoint).

Preferred Competencies

• Demonstrated strong diplomatic and communication skills with diverse stakeholders from a variety of country and cultural contexts.
• Demonstrated strong skills at creating and implementing new framework and analytics for tracking progress of a granting-type program.
• Strong written and oral communication skills wit