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 shelectures and hold workshops on high-performing teams.
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 a VP at Arizona State University before moving to UC Berkeley.
Elkins-Tanton has led four field expeditions in Siberia. She is co-chair of the NAS report A Science Strategy for the Human Exploration of Mars (2025). In 2013 she was named the Astor Fellow at Oxford University. 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. Asteroid (8252) Elkins-Tanton is named for her, as is the mineral elkinstantonite.
She published the book Earth, co-authored with Jeffrey Cohen, in 2017. Her more recent books include the memoir A Portrait of the Scientist as a Young Woman, and the leadership and project-oriented book Mission Ready: How to Build Teams that Perform Under Pressure.
