The collaborative
Who we are
Research Philanthropy Advisors is a collaborative of independent consultants and advisors, based in the UK, US, and Canada, working with research funders worldwide.
Most of what we do draws on practice from beyond philanthropy — because the problems funders face, in selection, operations and evaluation, are rarely unique to the sector. We're deliberately small. Where an engagement needs expertise we don't hold, we say so and connect you with someone who does.
Groundbreaking research deserves equally well-built processes around it.
FOUNDING TEAM
Consultants
The consultants specialise in grantmaking and philanthropy, and each leads their own engagements. The advisors are independent specialists in particular domains. They join an engagement only where it needs their expertise, never by default.
Dawid Potgieter
Research Strategy & Programme Design
Dawid advises senior executives on initiatives exceeding $200 million, covering strategy formulation, market research and process design through to execution. His portfolio includes the innovative Structured Adversarial Collaboration Accelerating Research on Consciousness initiative at Templeton World Charity Foundation when he served there as Director of Programs.
His work has been featured in the Financial Times, the Economist and Bloomberg. He holds a DPhil from Oxford and an Executive MBA from Cambridge.
Virginia Cooper
Grant Programme Design & Management
Virginia designs, implements and manages grant programmes. As an advisor to Templeton World Charity Foundation she manages innovative grant portfolios worth over $80 million.
She has extensive experience in research coordination, grant development and project management across the Global South and other diverse contexts, with a background spanning academia and nonprofit management. She holds a master's degree from Johns Hopkins.
Syman Stevens
Grants Operations & Systems
Syman specialises in operational efficiency and systems design for funders, integrating grant management systems with tools that reduce administrative load. He has worked as both a Program Officer and a Grant Management System Administrator, and advises grantmakers independently on streamlining grant development.
Syman is a Chartered Advisor in Philanthropy (CAP®) through the American College of Financial Services. He holds master's degrees from Cambridge and Columbia and a DPhil from Oxford, and is based in Greenville, South Carolina.
KEY EXPERTS
Advisors
Tanya Brown
Tanya is a Senior Scientific Project Manager with over 15 years in neuroscience research and large-scale open science initiatives. She has managed The Virtual Brain, an open-source brain modelling platform, and helped lead ARC-Cogitate, an adversarial collaboration arbitrating competing theories of consciousness.
She coordinates multidisciplinary teams across international institutions and works to FAIR principles, specialising in research workflows, data management and grant administration. She is a certified Project Management Professional.
Jay P. Singh
Jay is the founder of HigherEd+ and a Fulbright Scholar, with over 95 peer-reviewed publications and four books. He completed doctoral studies in psychiatry at Oxford and clinical psychology at Universität Konstanz, was named Norway's youngest tenured full professor in 2014, and has held faculty positions at Cambridge and Penn. His work has been covered in the Washington Post.