Chief Education Officer

Nishan's mission is to make original scientific research accessible to students regardless of institutional privilege. We build the infrastructure (peer-reviewed publication, research tooling, outreach, computational resources, and academic community) that lets pre-professional students across every STEM discipline become producers of knowledge rather than passive consumers of it. Our team is a growing group of researchers, educators, students, and operators who believe that the distribution of scientific talent is far wider than the distribution of scientific opportunity, and that this gap is an engineering problem we can solve.

A library of resources is not the same as an education. Students can be surrounded by material and still learn nothing if it is disorganized, pitched at the wrong level, or written by people who have forgotten what it is like not to already know. Nishan exists to give students the tools to produce knowledge, and the Chief Education Officer is the person most responsible for making sure those tools actually teach.

This is not a ceremonial role. As Chief Education Officer, you own the education department and all curriculum across the organization. You will direct our flagship library, the collection of interactive learning e-modules, curated original resources, research guides, and how-tos that students rely on to go from curiosity to competence. You will define what makes a learning resource good and hold every piece of content to it. You will lead the people who build that content, and you will be the person who says a module is not ready when it does not actually teach, because a library that looks impressive but leaves students confused fails the exact people it was built for.

If you are more interested in producing content than in the harder work of making sure students learn from it, this is not the right role, and we would rather tell you that now.

We believe the highest-impact work in science education is not teaching students facts but giving them the infrastructure to generate knowledge themselves. Nishan operates as a single coordinated organization pursuing a small number of ambitious efforts rather than a scattered collection of programs. We treat the quality of what we teach as a non-negotiable, because a resource that confuses the student it was meant to help does more damage than no resource at all. We are collaborative, we argue openly about how something should be taught, and we value people who can hold a high standard and a wide door at the same time. The easiest way to understand what we care about is to use what we have built and notice that it is meant to teach, not to impress.

Minimum education: None required. We evaluate candidates on the learning experiences they have designed and the groups they have led, not on credentials.

Required background: A record of designing educational material or programs and leading people to build them, demonstrated through curriculum, teaching, proposals, or comparable experience.

Commitment: This is currently a part-time and largely volunteer leadership role within a nonprofit organization. We are candid about this because we respect your time, and because the people who thrive here are motivated by the mission rather than the compensation.

Location: Remote, with occasional coordination across time zones. We are a distributed team.

We encourage you to apply even if you do not meet every qualification listed. Research consistently shows that people from underrepresented groups are more likely to experience imposter syndrome and to disqualify themselves prematurely. We would rather read your application and decide together than have you decide not to submit it. We think broadening who participates in science is central to our mission, and that makes a range of perspectives on our team more important, not less.

Your safety matters to us. Nishan representatives will only ever contact you from our official organizational domain. We will never ask for money, fees, or banking information at any stage. If a communication seems unusual, do not click any links. Visit our official site directly to confirm any opening.

Nishan is a mission-driven nonprofit built by people who think the current distribution of scientific opportunity is indefensible and fixable. We offer meaningful ownership over what and how the organization teaches, a collaborative and intellectually honest team, and the chance to shape what student science education is allowed to be. If that is the problem you want to work on, we want to read your application.