Tara Lincoln joins Packard Center team as new Director, Operations and Administration

2023 has been a big year of change for the Packard Center. Besides a new Scientific Director, Packard has also hired a new Director, Operations and Administration. Although Tara Lincoln might be new to the Packard Center, she is not new to ALS. 

For the past 12 years, Lincoln has worked behind the scenes at NEALS, the Northeast ALS Consortium, a non-profit organization based in Boston. NEALS aims to successfully promote both research and awareness of ALS, encouraging collaborations through a commitment to open scientific communication. Lincoln’s hard work has helped NEALS grow from a small cohort of ALS clinics in New England to an international powerhouse on the leading edge of research and one of the largest clinical trial groups in the world. Lincoln says she wants to bring that same energy to Packard.

“We can work to bring the community together to develop novel research approaches while also recruiting new investigators into the field, accelerating ALS research, and building partnerships,” Lincoln says.

Lincoln’s background is not neuroscience, but rather library science. After finishing her master’s degree at Simmons College, Lincoln decided to put her skills to use not in a library but in the non-profit research sector. Coming from a family of public-school teachers, the combination of intellectual rigor and community spirit made sense. In 2011, she joined NEALS as the Program Manager, working her way up to Director of Operations in 2017, where she remained. What attracted her to NEALS was how its collaborative spirit brought together people living with the disease, scientists, clinicians, and community members. 

“I appreciated everyone working together on clinical research and clinical trials. I believe that collaboration remains vital towards furthering our understanding of ALS and am inspired to be joining Packard, a brilliant organization whose dedication to collaboration and the development of new treatments for ALS is known and lauded around the world,” she says.

Lincoln remains based in Portland, Maine, although she will travel down to Baltimore each month to meet with the Packard team in person. When she was an undergrad at The George Washington University, Lincoln made frequent trips to Baltimore, something she looks forward to doing again with her work at Packard.

“It provides such a unique opportunity to work together and move something important forward,” Lincoln says.