Scientific Consortia Technical Alignment and Progress Reporting
Make your next consortium progress report / program review / board meeting clean—and stop the cross-site scramble.
I run the scientific alignment and reporting-readiness layer for multi-institution programs so your program story is coherent across sites, your milestones are defensible, and program review/SAB meetings produce decisions—not chaos.
This is for you if:
Reviews and program review meetings trigger a late-stage slide deck scramble and contradictory narratives across workstreams
Senior leadership is spending too much time translating and arbitrating between sites and disciplines
It’s hard to answer crisply: what’s on track, what’s at risk, what needs a decision
Reporting feels heavy because the underlying center and project structure isn’t integrated as efficiently and strategically as it could be.
The result: a coherent, review-ready consortium that runs without scramble and with internal stakeholders technically aligned.
Choose your entry point:
Upcoming progress report / program update / SAB / NIH, DARPA, ARPA-H meeting
Coherent story across sites (milestones + risks)
Deck structure that drives decisions and follow-through
Agenda architecture and decision framing
Internal stakeholder technical alignment / ongoing cross-site friction (between reporting cycles)
Decision rights and escalation paths
Milestone spine across workstreams and dependencies
Operating cadence and center restructuring so the program moves without PI arbitration — with internal and external stakeholders technically aligned.
Expertise
Cross-functional strategy management and execution for a $67M NIH-funded global antiviral drug discovery center
10+ institutions, multi-workstream coordination (pandemic preparedness)
Owned the layer that makes reviews and stakeholder meetings work: agency-facing reporting coherence for NIAID / SAB meetings, strategic meeting agenda-setting, cross-PI meeting and discussion facilitation, checking milestone integrity, etc.
What you get
This is complementary to project / program management but distinct. It’s the technical alignment integration layer that keeps a distributed scientific program legible and decision-ready.
Typical outputs (examples):
Decision cadence + escalation: what decisions happen where, who must be present, what constitutes a decision, and how issues surface early
Milestone spine across workstreams: owners, dependencies, review points, and “what counts as evidence” so progress is defensible
Funding agency meeting /SAB readiness package: reporting, slide deck architecture, strategic meeting agenda architecture, and decision framing that converges the program into a coherent narrative (science + milestones + risks)
Result: fewer last-minute scrambles, less PI arbitration, and a cleaner posture in reviews.
How this typically starts
Most engagements begin with a short call to map program shape, stakeholders, and where execution is sticking. Then we choose the lightest structure that solves the problem:
Quarter-long pilot (common when there’s urgency but hiring is slow)
Fractional integration lead (when the program needs steady cadence across sites)
Formal role (when the center wants this layer embedded)
If you already have a program director/ops lead, I’m happy to work directly with them since our roles are synergistic, with my focus on technical alignment and cross-functional strategy management — with PI time protected.
About Dr. Veena Thomas
Veena Thomas, Ph.D. bridges drug discovery and cross-functional alignment. Her background spans drug target biology, toxicology, drug discovery, structural biology, and computational pharmacology (UCSF Ph.D. with Brian Shoichet, Stanford postdoc with Vijay Pande, MIT undergrad with Vernon Ingram). She architected cross-functional strategy management inside a large multi-institution program (the global antiviral drug discovery NIH AViDD Center ASAP Discovery) and helps scientific leaders keep complex consortia coherent across sites—especially approaching funding agency / SAB milestones, board meetings, progress reports, and program reviews.