Paula P. Collins

Dr. Paula P. Collins is a senior staff member of the Human Health and Performance Systems Group at MIT Lincoln Laboratory, which focuses on technology-based enhancements to health, performance, and recovery through innovative and objective human-centered solutions. She also serves as portfolio lead for development and evaluation programs to advance integrated wearable sensing for improved health and human performance, primarily in support of military operations.  

Over the course of her 24-year career at the Laboratory, Collins gained extensive experience with "systems-of-systems" sensing architectures, complex large-scale data collections in the field, and objective data-driven evaluation of proposed advanced capabilities. As a past member of the technical staff, Collins led numerous efforts to develop and evaluate advanced mission-focused technologies. Collins served as the site lead for the Laboratory’s U.S. Transportation Command program to enable an operational architecture framework to support the combatant command's evolving processes and analytical applications. She served as principal investigator for the Accelerated Nuclear DNA Equipment (ANDE) program, a collaborative effort by seven government organizations to develop field-ready automated rapid human DNA profiling capabilities. She led the capability assessment of a service-oriented architecture enabling secured content discovery and retrieval across all four Service Distributed Common Ground System (DCGS) enclaves. She also served as lead analyst for the evaluation of proposed advanced capabilities for the SSGN-class submarines. Departing Lincoln Laboratory for a short period, Collins worked at Raytheon Integrated Defense Systems as a senior principal systems engineer, providing engineering and financial management support for globally sited regional ballistic missile defense radar systems. 

Collins (nee Pomianowski) received a BS degree in physics from the Pennsylvania State University, and MS and PhD degrees in experimental particle physics from the University of Pittsburgh. Her thesis research on charm quark production was conducted at CERN, the European Center for Nuclear Research in Geneva, Switzerland. Collins continued her research in particle physics as a post-doctoral associate at the Cornell University Synchrotron Laboratory. She is a contributing author on more than 150 research papers.