By Anne Levin

A new initiative designed to foster collaborative, interdisciplinary projects that are beyond the reach of single scholars has been announced by the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS). The Jonathan M. Nelson Center for Collaborative Research will launch its first call for proposals this fall.

The goal is to support “team-based, theme-based, inter-institutional, and interdisciplinary projects led by Institute scholars in collaboration with researchers across and beyond academia,” reads a release from the IAS. “The Nelson Center will provide seed funding to develop early-stage research ideas, large-scale funding for multi-year research agendas, and the space, infrastructure, and expertise for collaborative projects with partners across the globe.”

Like so many sweeping concepts credited to the IAS — Albert Einstein’s idea of quantum entanglement among them — the plan for the center began germinating over the Institute’s daily ritual of faculty afternoon tea, said IAS Director and Leon Levy Professor David Nirenberg.

“The Institute is famous for the way in which faculty get together over tea. We have such intimacy, and such a drive toward collaboration that comes from that intimacy,” he said. “But we haven’t always had the infrastructure to support projects that are large, or don’t fit in one school. A center for collaborative research is really us doubling down on our eternal mission.”

Nirenberg and IAS faculty began the teatime discussions of the idea more than two years ago. They identified three key needs: “New human and financial capital to support collaborative or multidisciplinary research, increased capacity for large-scale projects, and the physical and administrative infrastructure to support projects across and outside the Institute’s four schools of Historical Studies, Social Science, Natural Sciences, and Mathematics,” according to the release.

The Nelson Center will have space in the IAS’ Historical Studies-Social Science Library, which is currently being expanded. The Center is named for trustee Jonathan M. Nelson, founder and chairman of Providence Equity Partners LLC, “someone who really appreciates the kind of culture of discovery at the Institute,” said Nirenberg. Support also comes from the Gerard B. Lambert Foundation.

Nelson said the goals of the Center “are ambitious but consistent with the mission of the Institute. We know that breakthrough discoveries and advancement in deep understanding of profound questions often occur at the boundaries of disciplines. We see this both in the results of collaborations of diverse talent and in the work of individuals who have the rare ability to cross traditional disciplinary boundaries. Recognizing this fundamental property of breakthrough learning, the Center’s goal is to encourage and support such work.”

The initiative increases the reach of research by faculty members and expands relationships “with thought-leaders around the world,” Nelson continued. “Along with others, I am proud to support this new Center and its important goals.”

Joining the Center as executive director on August 1 is David Zielinski, who is currently the head of Harvard Catalyst and associate dean for clinical and translational research at Harvard Medical School.

Founded in 1930, the IAS convenes a cohort of some 250 visiting scholars each year. They conduct research alongside 24 permanent faculty. Early members of that faculty include Einstein, John von Neumann, and Erwin Panofsky. J. Robert Oppenheimer served as IAS director from 1947 to 1966.

“Since its founding, the Institute’s mission has been to create a research community in which talented individuals from all over the world have been able to realize their highest capacity for discovery, uninhibited by boundaries of dogma or discipline,” Nirenberg said in the release. “The Nelson Center strengthens our ability to fulfill that mission into our second century, and expands our ability to explore what Director J. Robert Oppenheimer called ‘the synapses’ between the sciences, humanities and arts, and society.”