Lindy Elkins-Tanton
Principal Investigator (lead) of the NASA Psyche mission, Director of the Interplanetary Initiative at ASU, and co-founder of Beagle Learning
Dr. Lindy Elkins-Tanton is the Principal Investigator (lead) of the NASA Psyche mission,
Director of the Interplanetary Initiative at ASU, 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 she promotes and
practices inquiry and exploration learning. Her mission is to create a generation of
problem-solvers. Elkins-Tanton received her B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. from MIT. She was a
researcher at Brown University, faculty at MIT, and a director at the Carnegie Institution
for Science before moving to the directorships at Arizona State University.
Elkins-Tanton has led four field expeditions in Siberia. She is a two-time NAS Kavli Frontiers
of Science Fellow and served on the Planetary Decadal Survey Mars panel, and the Mars 2020 Rover
Science Definition Team, and now serves on the Europa Clipper Standing Review Board. In 2010 she
was awarded the Explorers Club Lowell Thomas award. Asteroid (8252) Elkins-Tanton is named for her.
In 2013 she was named the Astor Fellow at Oxford University. She published the book Earth, co-authored
with Jeffrey Cohen, in 2017. She is a fellow of the American Geophysical Union, and of the American
Mineralogical Society, and in 2018 she was elected to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.
