Lindy Elkins-Tanton

NASA Principal Investigator, Planetary Scientist and Educator & Expert in Teamwork and Leadership

Lindy Elkins-Tanton

NASA Principal Investigator, Planetary Scientist and Educator & Expert in Teamwork and Leadership

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Biography

Lindy Elkins-Tanton is a world-renowned planetary scientist, educator and member of the National Academy of Sciences. She is the Principal Investigator of NASA’s Psyche mission, co-founder of the education company Beagle Learning and Professor with the Interplanetary Initiative at Arizona State University, one of the top Earth and planetary science research schools in the United States.

She also has 30 years of experience in the creation of effective interdisciplinary teams, setting culture, maximizing discovery, and surviving crises, in organizations from startups to megaprojects.

She was the second woman in history to compete for and win a NASA deep-space mission. Asteroid (8252) Elkins-Tanton and the mineral Elkinstantonite are named for her.
Her memoir A Portrait of the Scientist as a Young Woman was published by William Morrow in 2022.

Elkins-Tanton received her bachelor's and master's degrees from MIT in 1987, then spent eight years working in business, with five years writing business plans for young high-tech ventures. She then returned to MIT for a doctorate. She spent five years as a researcher at Brown University, followed by five years on MIT faculty, before accepting the directorship of the Department of Terrestrial Magnetism at the Carnegie Institution for Science. In 2014, she moved to the directorship at Arizona State University.

Speaker Videos

2023 Mars Farmhouse

Change Begins with a Question | Lindy Elkins-Tanton | TEDxStMarksSchool

How One Mom Started Her PhD At 31 And Made NASA History

Lindy Elkins-Tanton's Hot Take on the Psyche Mission and Team Culture

Grit with Lindy Elkins Tanton

Class I Speaker, Linda Elkins-Tanton - 2018 Induction Ceremony

Connecting with Nature Around You with Lindy Elkins-Tanton

Setting your Big Goal Question

Lindy Elkins-Tanton: Why Teamwork Helps Scientists Thrive

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Speech Topics

Mission Ready: How to Build Teams That Perform Under Pressure

Mission Ready provides a blueprint for building strong teams capable of delivering exceptional results in high-pressure situations. Leaders set the tone, but every team member determines both their own success and the success of the team. Drawing on social science, cognitive science, and organizational science research, Elkins-Tanton gives practical advice on how both individual contributors and leaders can excel. Even for projects that don’t involve launching a rocket into space, the lessons in this talk will help your audience take their teams to new heights.

The NASA Psyche Mission: A Team’s Journey to a Metal World

What does it mean to work with hundreds of talented people design and build a spacecraft so complex that no single person understands how it all works? And then, after launch, that spacecraft has to work without repair as it flies for a decade on a mission of discovery in space. “Psyche” is both the name of an asteroid in the main belt, orbiting out past Mars, and the name of our NASA mission to visit that asteroid. Psyche appears to be metallic, a kind of world humans have never visited.

In this interactive talk about teams, having a vision, and persisting through incredible challenges, audiences will learn:

Some of the significant crises the team faced and how we overcame them,
How we built our successful team culture and communications, and
The top five skills individuals need to be the best possible team members.

Space exploration is inspiring and mind-expanding, but the real purpose is showing what we humans can do when we pull together.

Given about 100 times in the last three years, including at Maxar Corporation, Tetra Tech, Unilever, MIT, Goldstone (NASA Deep Space Network), SpaceX (1,200 people, their most highly-attended all-company lecture ever), at the Canadian School of Public Service, the Explorers Club, and Jeff Bezos’ private MARS conference.

Keeping Your Team Tight in an Age of AI and Remote Work

Every day we hear about AI and remote work, both of which replace close human interactions, and wonder what these trends will do to our companies, our teams, and ourselves. Now we’re in a world where as much as 30% of the workforce is remote, and where the majority of workers use generative AI for their jobs. Where does that leave the central functions of human communication and innovation, human problem-solving, and the future of our jobs?

In this interactive talk about human teams, the audience will learn:

How to magnify the benefits and minimize the threats of remote work,
How we keep our teams connected and flourishing by using lessons from deep social and cognitive science research, and
The skills that humans do better than any AI and that we need to nurture, including finding and solving problems, setting strategy for our projects, and communicating.

Set in a framework of stories from teams both rising in success and contending with challenges, the tools and lessons learned come to life.

The Hunt and the Fix: Turn Your Team Into a Problem-Solving Monster

The central function of teams is to recognize problems and then find their best solution. In this workshop we’ll bring the best cognitive and social research to bear on leveling-up your team to even greater skill at problem-solving.

Audience takeaways

What interactions lead to the greatest capacity to identify problems in time to solve them,
How to craft meetings to develop the greatest range of solutions and pick the best one, and
How every team member plays a role in keeping their team great.

Audience interactions

A pre-workshop survey on team functioning,
Co-generation of a toolkit that enables every team member to redirect meetings that are going off-course, and
Breakout group case studies to identify non-optimal processes and develop the confidence to redirect.

This workshop has been held with NASA mission teams and with project teams at universities, including Berkeley.

Reveal the Biggest Questions: How to Build Fast-Moving Project Teams That Move Your Organization into the Future

This is the moment to reimagine innovation and research, for greatest use of resources, the greatest use of all human minds, and the greatest progress into the most positive possible future. Using this Big Questions process we have started 45 pilot projects over the past eight years, and these teams have yielded an 7x return on our seed investment to date.

No more incremental progress. No more focusing on unimportant goals. In this workshop, we'll identify the most important questions in your area and set up teams for pilot projects. Together we will:

Collect the most important directions for research and project teams in your organization,
Develop project concepts with small volunteer teams,
Prep these teams for success in pilot projects.

Many private-sector and academic participants, including the Mayo Clinic leadership workshops, the Smithsonian Institution, and SABIC C-suite.

Testimonials

"She is one of the THE MOST interesting and engaging speakers I've ever had the pleasure of listening to! Thank you for bringing her to speak!"

- InfoSys CrossRoads Conference

“Lindy's comment about the Quaker principle of, 'no one speaks twice until everyone speaks once' felt, to me, so illuminating, both in the small scale/practical sense and in the broader sense. I also very much appreciated Lindy highlighting how in something like space exploration/travel, there is, by necessity, a team of myriad experts, none of whom could do this work alone nor whom is the most important.”

- Next Generation Education Workforce

"I cannot say enough about how much I appreciated Dr. Elkins-Tanton's presentations. She is humble and astonishing. She was down to earth and up in space and brought us with her. The concepts of how to design innovation will stay with me. I will never forget her presentations, she was open, engaged, encouraging and inspiring."

- Mayo Leadership Workshop