Leadership

David Searles Zielinski is the founding Executive Director of the Jonathan M. Nelson Center for Collaborative Research at the Institute for Advanced Study; a new interdisciplinary unit that creates space for scholarly connections across the Institute and serves as a bridge for engagement with other research institutions. A noted administrator, he served for six years as the executive director of Harvard Catalyst | The Harvard Clinical and Translational Science Center and as associate dean for clinical and translational research at Harvard Medical School, modernizing research support and opportunities for collaboration across Harvard’s schools and affiliated hospitals. Prior to this, he was the associate dean of science in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Columbia University, overseeing key aspects of finance, faculty affairs, strategic planning, communications, and fundraising for the sciences. He also spent nearly a decade at the National Institutes of Health where he led offices focused on science policy and planning. He holds a Ph.D. in developmental psychology from Cornell University, served on the research faculty of Duke University, and has received numerous awards and fellowships for his work. 

Nina Amla is the Senior Research Development Officer in the Jonathan M. Nelson Center for Collaborative Research. Her fifteen-year-long tenure at the National Science Foundation, as a senior science advisor and a program director, was dedicated to fostering interdisciplinary research directed at global and societal challenges. She led the development of several impactful interdisciplinary programs ranging from developing sociotechnical approaches to cybersecurity to exploring how computing technologies like AI can accelerate scientific discovery to designing software systems that are demonstrably accountable to law or regulation. Prior to the NSF, she was a researcher at Cadence Design Systems, exploring new formal methods to improve the correctness of computing systems. She holds a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Texas at Austin, and has served on numerous interagency policy committees and working groups focused on research and innovation in science and technology.