Daniel Linzer became the President of Research Corporation for Science Advancement on October 1, 2017, after serving on the faculty and as provost of Northwestern University. In preparation for his retirement from RCSA on July 1, 2025, he offered a few reflections on some of the ways the foundation has evolved during his presidency and strengthened its core values of service, “not just as a funder but as an engaged participant in the larger fabric of science.”
During his eight years at the foundation, Linzer said RCSA has made incremental but impactful changes.
“As a modest-sized foundation, we’ve looked for ways to use our capabilities and our connections as leverage to influence the way science is done,” Linzer said. “That’s where we can provide leadership in ways that you can’t just buy with dollars.”
He said an example of that leadership is RCSA’s expanding emphasis on community building as a way to welcome into its programs a broader array of physical scientists from a wider spectrum of backgrounds, approaches, experiences, institutions, and geographical locations.
“It’s hard work funding good scientists everywhere, instead of just turning to a few name-brand places,” he said. “We have tried to approach it differently as we build our communities and to reach excellent scientists who might be overlooked.”
While catalyzing cross-collaborations among scientists it supports, RCSA has also been an example to others in its ability to form collaborations with other foundations, government agencies, and the broader philanthropic community.
RCSA was a founding member of the Science Philanthropy Alliance, and Linzer has served on its board of directors. (Incoming RCSA President Eric Isaacs will serve on the Alliance board as well.)
RCSA staff routinely engage with the work of the Alliance, sharing their expertise on program development, measurement, and their experience gathering feedback to respond to significant challenges such as the pandemic and the current cuts to federal science funding.
“RCSA continues to be a go-to organization for other organizations (even larger ones) for professional and responsive action,” Linzer said.
Over the last few years, RCSA has shown its strength as a smaller organization in its ability to pivot quickly in a crisis, and Linzer said its work in response to the COVID pandemic represented some of the most gratifying efforts of his time at the foundation.
“People were hurting and scared that their careers were getting off-track, and they needed more than money,” Linzer said. “By creating the Cottrell Conversations, for example, RCSA helped faculty discuss how to switch rapidly from in-person to online education. Those conversations also contributed to an understanding of where additional resources would do the most good.”
In response to the pandemic, RCSA convened several virtual meetings in 2020 for chemists, physicists, and astronomers in its community, and funded collaborative projects to design innovative approaches to analyze, detect, or limit the spread of SARS-CoV2. In addition, RCSA repurposed funds from canceled in-person meetings to offer fellowships to senior postdocs working in the research groups of Cottrell Scholars, augmenting that support with grants from the National Science Foundation.
“It was gratifying to see that we as an organization could do that, and that the NSF would contact us wanting to piggyback on our program,” he said. “We moved quickly and were able to support 25 postdocs over two years who might have fallen through the cracks. Many of those have gone on to have faculty positions.”
In addition, the postdoctoral fellowships allowed RCSA to influence the training the postdocs received, as the awards included a requirement that the recipients be the primary instructors in a for-credit course in order to gain valuable experience as teachers.
For two years, RCSA also offered postbaccalaureate fellowships to undergraduates working with Cottrell Scholars, as well as supplements for scientific instrumentation.
As complex scientific problems cross disciplinary boundaries more and more, RCSA has broadened its definition of “physical sciences,” relaxing certain disciplinary restrictions to expand eligibility.
“The physical sciences have to speak more broadly to the scientific community and should not be walled off,” Linzer said.
It also reopened its programs to scientists at institutions in Canada, which had been closed in response to the 2008 financial crisis.
During Linzer’s tenure, RCSA also began implementing an indirect cost policy on research grants.
“Having been on the other side of that equation for a number of years, I felt we needed to support the research infrastructure at the institutions where our awardees work,” Linzer said.
Linzer said changes RCSA has made to its programs and awards processes in recent years reflect a holistic approach that engages the participating cohorts of scientists in conversation about their needs, and involves them in decision making and assessment.
Within the Cottrell Scholars program, eligibility was expanded to include faculty with any type of appointment in a core physical sciences department, award sizes were increased, and the portfolio of Cottrell Plus awards was adjusted. The TREE and FRED awards were supplanted by two new awards: STAR, for excellence in Science Teaching And Research, and IMPACT, for Cottrell Scholars who have made significant contributions to the field nationally through leadership. The program’s SEED awards were expanded to include two new tracks: New Research Directions, for potentially transformative new research projects, and Exceptional Opportunities, for existing research projects at undergraduate colleges.
In addition, RCSA established the Robert Holland Jr. Award in 2023 in response to the community’s desire to welcome into its ranks more senior researchers with significant experience and impact in making the physical sciences an endeavor in which all students can thrive. Creating this award involved extensive discussion between the Cottrell Scholar Program Committee, staff, and the RCSA Board of Directors. “The resulting response from the CS community has been pure enthusiasm,” Linzer said.
The Scialog program has changed too, expanding to a maximum of six meetings per year, launching new themes connecting physical and life sciences, and working in partnership with more than 30 other foundations, federal agencies, and private philanthropists.
Assessment of Scialog as a catalyst of collaborative teams moved from data collection to data analysis during recent years, thanks to an extremely productive partnership with the research group of Danny Abrams in Applied Mathematics and Engineering Sciences at Northwestern University. Several papers have been published on Scialog’s innovative process, and more are in development.
“As a way to spark interdisciplinary collaboration, Scialog is a model that has influenced the thinking of other organizations,” Linzer said.
Building on a Cottrell Scholars Collaborative project RCSA funded in 2017, RCSA also launched the RCSA Fellows Initiative in 2024 to support outstanding early career scientists through the transition from postdoctoral trainee to independent scientist. Now in its second year, the initiative has received positive feedback from participants and the institutions around the country who have hosted Fellows for the mock interviews that, along with community building, are a critical component of the program.
“Our hope is that the initiative helps build a network of teacher-scholars who can learn from and support each other as they move ahead in their careers,” Linzer said.
During Linzer’s years with the foundation, RCSA also wrapped up two long-term investments in science infrastructure: the Large Binocular Telescope (LBT) on Mount Graham near Tucson, and the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST, now the Vera C. Rubin Observatory) in Chile. With no remaining leadership or governance roles in these projects, RCSA’s interest as a catalytic initial investor in those projects has now turned to seeding science; in 2024, RCSA began a new, three-year Scialog series to ignite early discoveries with data from the Rubin Observatory’s Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST).
Internally, RCSA’s operations have become more robust during Linzer’s presidency. Two new program directors were added to the staff, and a new grants management team with expertise in subawards and federal contracts has reimagined how the foundation administers awards, “broadening the scope of who we can include in our programs and with whom we can partner,” Linzer said.
Data analysis is now performed in-house, while information technology support has been outsourced. RCSA’s post-pandemic hybrid schedule, with staff in the office 50% of the time, has proved effective, while a variety of team-building activities such as museum visits and volunteering at the local food bank has helped maintain camaraderie among the staff.
In terms of governance, RCSA’s Board of Directors implemented new financial strategies during Linzer’s tenure that enabled RCSA’s corpus to grow more, as well as a thoughtful, skills-based new process for identifying potential new board members.
“The board is not just a collection of separate committees of expertise in finance or academia or management, for example, but a collective that cares deeply about what we do,” Linzer said. “They are partners in this enterprise.”
Early in Linzer’s presidency, the board decided to schedule one of their three yearly meetings at different locations across the country so they could hear in-person from partner foundations, awardees, and other stakeholders at local institutions. These listening sessions have provided valuable insight.
In retirement, Linzer plans to serve on the board of trustees of Hampton University, as an adviser to the Science Philanthropy Alliance, and will continue to represent RCSA at public forums and functions as President Emeritus.
“We built something here that works really well, and I think I’ve done what I can do,” Linzer said. “Now is a real opportunity for someone else to come in and take a fresh look and find new ways for the foundation to operate that could take it to the next level.”
At a time when the scientific enterprise is under attack, he said RCSA is positioned to use its convening and connecting powers to help reimagine a more sustainable and efficient future.
“The way science is done is changing,” he said. “We don’t want the future to just happen to us. We can help design it.”