Lindy Elkins-Tanton

Lindy Elkins-Tanton is an American planetary scientist and professor whose research concerns terrestrial planetary evolution. She is the Principal Investigator of NASA's Psyche mission to explore the metallic asteroid 16 Psyche, Arizona State University Vice President of the Interplanetary Initiative, and co-founder of Beagle Learning, a tech company training and measuring collaborative problem-solving and critical thinking.

Career
Dr. Elkins-Tanton earned her B.S. in geology, M.S. in geochemistry, and Ph.D. in geology, all from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She was a professor at MIT, a research scientist at Brown University, and a lecturer at St. Mary's College of Maryland, and worked in the business world for a number of years. Within 10 years of completing her Ph.D. and serving as an associate professor in geology at MIT, she was recruited to the directorship position at the Carnegie Institution for Science's Department of Terrestrial Magnetism. She became the director of Arizona State University's School of Earth and Space Science on July 1, 2014.

Elkins-Tanton leads NASA's Psyche mission to explore the metallic asteroid 16 Psyche. On January 4, 2017, NASA announced the mission had been selected to proceed to mission formulation. Elkins-Tanton is the second woman to lead a NASA mission to a major Solar System body.

Elkins-Tanton is also a Co-Founder of and the Higher Education Lead for Beagle Learning, which provides software tools and coaching that make exploration-based learning techniques accessible.

Awards and honors
Elkins-Tanton was twice named a National Academy of Sciences Kavli Frontiers of Science Fellow. She was awarded a five-year National Science Foundation CAREER award in 2008 and was named Outstanding MIT Faculty Undergraduate Research Mentor in 2009. In 2010, she was awarded the Explorers Club Lowell Thomas prize for Exploring Extinction. In 2013, she was named an Astor Fellow at the University of Oxford hosted by Tamsin Mather. In 2016 she was named a fellow of the American Geophysical Union. In 2020 she was awarded the Arthur L. Day Prize and Lectureship. Asteroid 8252 Elkins-Tanton is named after her. She is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, and in 2022 William Morrow published her memoir, A Portrait of the Scientist as a Young Woman.

In 2022, a newly discovered mineral, elkinstantonite, found in the El Ali meteorite, was named after Elkins-Tanton by Dr. Andrew Locock of the University of Alberta.