Uniting
Research and Policy

Margaret Goud Collins has been working at the intersection of science and policy since 1977, holding positions in academia, government, and the nonprofit sector. Since 1997, she has been central to US participation in the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA), an international science and policy research institute near Vienna, Austria. She served as Program Director for the U.S. Committee for IIASA at the NAS, then as the IIASA Secretary in Vienna, where she was responsible for building links between the Institute and global scientific communities related to energy, water resources, land use, population, risk, air quality, climate, negotiations, and systems modeling. She is presently Executive Director for the Friends of IIASA nonprofit in the U.S.

She has previously worked for the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, the U.S. Geological Survey, and the NOAA Chief Scientist.

Her scientific background is geology and oceanography, with degrees from Stanford and the MIT/WHOI Joint Program in Oceanography, and guest appointments at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and the University of the Philippines Marine Science Institute. She was elected an AAAS Fellow in 2008 in Section X: Societal Impacts of Science and Engineering.