As other commenters have noted, large universities are quite heterogeneous and their administrations are fairly decoupled from their research activity, except in a big-picture sense. The timing is basically irrelevant because you might as well regard Stanford Data Science and the Stanford University Administration as separate entities for all directly-research-related purposes.

I'm a researcher at a large university (admittedly a grad student, and therefore more insulated from university administrivia than a professor), and I don't even know who my university's president is.