Lindy Elkins-Tanton

Lindy Elkins-Tanton
Nationality American
Fields Planetary Science
Institutions School of Earth and Space Exploration, Arizona State University; Carnegie Institution for Science; Brown University; St. Mary's College of Maryland
Alma mater Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Known for Director, Department of Terrestrial Magnetism (DTM) of the Carnegie Institution for Science; Director, School of Earth and Space Science, Arizona State University

Lindy Elkins-Tanton is a planetary scientist with expertise in planet formation and evolution. She is the Director of the School of Earth and Space Exploration at Arizona State University (ASU) in Tempe, Arizona.

Career

Lindy 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 Carnegie’s Department of Terrestrial Magnetism. Her appointment as Director of ASU’s School of Earth and Space Science took effect on July 1, 2014.[1]

Psyche spacecraft

Lindy, the Principal Investigator, proposed a mission to NASA's Discovery Program called Psyche to explore the metallic asteroid 16 Psyche. On Sept 30, 2015, NASA announced that this mission is one of five finalist proposals.[2] The winner will be chosen around December 2016[3] and must be ready to launch by the end of 2021.[4][5]

Awards and honors

Among her many awards, 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.[6] In 2013, she was named the Astor Fellow at the University of Oxford in 2013. In addition to these prestigious honors, Asteroid 8252 Elkins-Tanton was named after her.[7]

Selected publications

References

External links

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