Lindy Elkins-Tanton

Lindy Elkins-Tanton is a Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences and Director of the Berkeley Space Sciences Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley. She earned her B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. from MIT, and previously held positions at Brown University, MIT, the Carnegie Institution for Science, and Arizona State University. Her research focuses on planetary geochemistry, asteroid formation, and the evolution of rocky bodies, with particular emphasis on metal-rich worlds and early solar system processes. She serves as Principal Investigator of NASA’s Psyche mission, which is conducting the first up-close exploration of the metal-rich asteroid (16) Psyche, and her recent publications examine Psyche’s formation scenarios, internal structure, and magnetic properties. Elkins-Tanton received the Explorers Club Lowell Thomas Prize (2010), was an Astor Fellow at Oxford (2013), and was elected to the National Academy of Sciences (2021). She has co-chaired NAS reports on Mars exploration and served on NASA’s Mars 2020 Science Definition Team and Europa Clipper review boards.