Lindy Elkins-Tanton is a world-renowned planetary scientist and member of the National Academy of Sciences. She is the principal investigator of the NASA Psyche mission, and director of the Space Sciences Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley. Previously, she was vice president at Arizona State University, director of the Department of Terrestrial Magnetism at the Carnegie Institution for Science, and faculty at MIT. Among her major original research achievements are the discovery that the Siberian flood basalts caused the end-Permian extinction, the revelation that rocky planets are born wet, and the concept of “drip volcanism.” Asteroid (8252) Elkins-Tanton is named for her.
