In December 2019, Bradford Francis joined the Department of Biostatistics at the School of Public Health as its new administrative director, tasked with managing the department’s $2.8 million operating budget and overseeing 40 researchers and their grant portfolios.

Within months, the COVID pandemic upended work in the department, putting Francis’ administrative skills to the test. 

“Brad’s creativity and problem-solving skills proved invaluable, making it possible for us to switch to remote work seamlessly,” says Josée Dupuis, professor and chair of biostatistics.

Francis brings to SPH experience in grant and financial management—and considerable talent with spreadsheets—after serving in posts at Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Soon after he arrived, he developed new systems and workflows for tracking salary distributions and grant portfolios in the department. 

As department chair, Dupuis says the new systems are incredibly useful, especially when trying to identify faculty members with the bandwidth to take on new research projects or teaching assignments. As a principal investigator herself, she has used the tools to make projections that helped her decide how to allocate her own time and research funding. “The up-to-date portfolio information has allowed me to investigate multiple scenarios to weather the pandemic,” she says.

Making his colleagues lives easier by thinking a step ahead is a skill Francis honed early in his professional life. As his first job out of college, he staffed the front desk at Boston’s Ritz-Carlton hotel. The customer-service training drilled into him the importance of trying to anticipate people’s needs—whether they’re guests of a high-end hotel or faculty members at a research University. 

Francis is now turning his attention to the academic side of the department, looking for ways to streamline work for the department’s academic staff. “It will be a unique challenge because I don’t know much about that side of the house,” he says. But he says he’s always happy to learn, and looks forward to combining his staff’s academic expertise with his own management skills to see what efficiencies they can create. 

In addition to revamping systems and processes within the department—and lending a hand in the Department of Epidemiology while it was understaffed—Francis has reorganized the department’s shared server to make files easier for everyone to find and use. He has also made it a priority to create growth opportunities for his direct reports, encouraging them to learn new responsibilities and take ownership of new tasks. 

Ultimately, Francis says, his goal is to make administrative tasks as seamless as possible for students, researchers, and faculty, “so that they can do the best job that they can—and focus on what they’re here to focus on.”