Lindy Elkins-Tanton is the Principal Investigator(lead)of the NASA Psyche mission, Director of the UC Berkeley Space Sciences Laboratory, and co-founder of Beagle Learning, a tech company training and measuring collaborative problem-solving and critical thinking. Her research concerns terrestrial planetary formation and evolution, and shepromotes and practices inquiry and exploration learning.
Elkins-Tanton received her B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. from MIT. She was a researcher at Brown University, faculty at MIT, a director at the Carnegie Institution for Science and at Arizona State University before moving to UC Berkeley.
Elkins-Tanton has led four field expeditions in Siberia. She is co-chair of the forthcoming NAS report A Science Strategy for the Human Exploration of Mars (2025), served on the Planetary Decadal Survey Mars panel, and the Mars 2020 Rover Science Definition Team, and the Europa Clipper Standing Review Board. In 2010 she was awarded the Explorers Club Lowell Thomas prize. Asteroid (8252) Elkins-Tanton is named for her, as is the mineral elkinstantonite. In 2013 she was named the Astor Fellow at Oxford University. She published the bookEarth, co-authored with Jeffrey Cohen,in 2017. She is a fellow of the American Geophysical Union, and of the American Mineralogical Society,the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, and in 2021 was elected to the National Academy of Sciences.
