Interview for “Portrait of the Scientist as a Young Woman”

For one planetary scientist, Lindy Elkins-Tanton of Arizona State University has perhaps a particularly eclectic resume.

She worked in business, raised sheep and border collies, and taught math, among other jobs. Today, she is NASA’s principal investigator Psychic mission, a spacecraft designed to explore the asteroid of the same name, which appears to be made mostly of metal. She tells the story of all these experiences and more in her new memoir, “Portrait of the scientist as a young woman (opens in new tab)”, (William Morrow, 2022).

Space.com sat down with Elkins-Tanton to discuss her new book, how she got into planetary science, why she fights bullying in academia, and more. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

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Space.com: How did the book come about for you?

Lindy Elkins-Tanton: I considered writing a book about the history of the study. I am very interested in the role of wealth, gender, society and nationality in the history of research. I started talking to an agent about it, and she said, “You know, that’s interesting, but your story is much more interesting.” So we started talking about a different book, and I was so excited that someone would be interested.

Space.com: How did you decide to make it so personal?

Elkins-Tanton: To me, that human experience is simply the more interesting and useful part. You can read science facts and such in many places. But when I read—even a book that’s mostly about science or mostly about exploration or mostly about space—I really want to know what the person was doing, what they were thinking, how they got there, why they made the choices they made . I feel that makes it really relevant and interesting.

And for me, that’s the part of my story that might be unusual and interesting to others, that I didn’t have some kind of straight shot, I didn’t know where I was going from the beginning. In high school, I really thought, “Do I want to do music? Or am I really interested in science?” And then when it was science, I really thought I wanted to do animal behavior. I ended up majoring in geology, which is also something I really love, but then my curiosity about the world was stronger than my confidence in myself as a scientist. And so I was very curious to learn about the business and then, after my undergraduate degree, I went and worked in the business for a few years. And it was so interesting to see the many ways that people organize teams and try to get things done and what motivates people and it was very different from academia.

Space.com: You mentioned your detour – how has that lived experience influenced the work you do?

Elkins-Tanton: When I returned to academia for graduate school, I had people say things to me like, “It’s a shame you spent all this time doing business, but now you’re back on track.” It felt like it was too late and I had done myself a disservice.

I’ve had people say, “Wasn’t it awful working in a business where everyone is so cruel?” And I’d say that’s not really so much my experience. A powerful academic place can be more violent than any other place I know.

I saw the power of having a common goal, which in business is often the ultimate goal, to sell the product, whatever it is. But having a bottom line brings people together, and that’s something that motivates me so much in the bigger projects I’ve organized. And of course, the biggest of them all is the Psyche mission. Everyone on the team wants to build this robot to go into space and find out what it’s like an asteroid is that no man has ever seen. And this motivating community brings the whole team together. I feel like these are the times when people are at their best. So that’s one of the things that I really brought with me from the business world: that having a world where it’s really every man for himself, as it is in some parts of academia, is not really the best a way to get ahead or a good workplace.

Space.com: There’s a chapter where you write about several years of fieldwork you did in Siberia looking for geological signs of what caused the end-Permian mass extinction. How did it feel to look back on that fieldwork?

Elkins-Tanton: Going back and thinking about all that work in Siberia was so much fun. I think in retrospect it even seems more exotic and fantastic than it did back then. This really was just about the sweetest kind of revision. It’s not that far in the past – I just published another article about all this last year – but 2006 is a little long ago and I’m revisiting what it smelled like to be there and what things tasted like, the food we ate and the ways we got around around and just seeing Russia from the inside and thinking about it in today’s context — it was all so fun to revisit.

Space.com: Throughout the book, you write about dealing with bullying in academia. Why was it important for you to include these experiences?

Elkins-Tanton: The things I really wanted to write about, I found, were the things that were very emotionally resonant for me. They were either difficult or surprising, or they led me to some small insight about people. These were the parts of the story that felt like they were just dying to get on the page.

Learning about how organizations and teams make themselves better functioning and safer for more people has been a crazy learning experience. One of the things I’ve really learned about this is something that might seem completely obvious: Not everyone cares about these things. People who don’t feel threatened or sympathetic to those who are bullied or bullied, those few people who have never been bullied or bullied may not feel super motivated to care for the species team culture problem.

The other thing I learned is that change in human organizations is slow. I think that in this case, in particular, both ends of the hierarchy should be working toward a common goal. You need the rank-and-file, so to speak, all of us who do the day-to-day work, to be willing to report and to be willing to push for a better culture, to hold management accountable. This is scary and hard to do.

And then, on the other hand, management must be determined to create an ethically correct, well-functioning organization. A lot of times it’s much easier for leaders to find a way to get past someone and not criticize them, not reprimand them, not fire them when they’ve misbehaved, because often those are the people who have the power and benefit to the organizations. Leaders must be determined that creating a situation where people are not harassed and harassed is more important. It’s almost like you need a little perfect storm of a lot of elements to get an organization to really work on it.

Space.com: You mentioned earlier that you were thinking of writing a book about the history of exploration. What do you think of the research idea?

Elkins-Tanton: I wonder if we take it a little for granted, especially those of us interested in space exploration, that we are able to do so much research on our solar system purely in the service of science and the knowledge we accumulate for humanity in this way.

When you look back in time, science has never been the motivator for great research. Science came as a ride, didn’t it? Charles Darwin was the gentleman companion of the ship’s captain who was going to do research and create a better economic environment for England. It had nothing to do with the discovery of evolution or any kind of science, it was actually what Darwin did in his spare time.

There are so many examples where the research is really all about nationalism, or heroism, or most importantly trade and business. And now we live in this amazing world where we can actually only explore in the service of learning more.

As a kid, I was so fascinated by stories about exploration: The first Europeans to go to Africa, what animals they found, things like that. I just ate those books, I still have them, the same copies of the books I read.

It wasn’t until I entered college that I realized that women were generally never invited to do this work. To have a world now where it’s a little bit more possible for women to lead research is pretty amazing. And of course it’s not just about women, it’s where you are on the socioeconomic ladder, what color your skin is compared to other people around you, all those things that can turn people off.

But the history of research exclusion doesn’t mean the rest of us don’t want to learn and discover and explore. There’s a kind of shiny world where we imagine it’s a little more complicated once you scratch the surface.

Space.com: What do you hope people get out of the book?

Elkins-Tanton: What I’m really hoping for is that there will be some kind of human connection for everyone, that we’ll all have some sort of shared experience, and so you’ll almost feel like meeting a person and getting to know them a little bit. I would really appreciate that. And also maybe there’s an aspect of encouragement for people moving up in their careers that you don’t have to know all the answers from the start and that you can trust yourself. Wherever joy takes you is a good place.

Space.com: Is there anything else about the book you’d like to share?

Elkins-Tanton: One thing that I wasn’t even super clear about myself when I started writing the book, and then it became really obvious to me, was that when I was in my late 20s, I was really in a mess. I had a lot of anxiety and depression and all these nightmares and I was a single mom and I had different things going on that I had to work on. At that point, I don’t think there was much in me to suggest that I would be effective or make a path of any variety.

And so I think it’s good, at least for me, to remember that sometimes people don’t shine as bright as they could, and that with some support and encouragement, amazing things can happen. Perhaps the lesson is always to look beyond the first impression you have of a person and see what else they have to offer.

You can buy Portrait of a Scientist as a Young Woman at Amazon (opens in new tab) or Bookshop.org (opens in new tab).

Email Megan Bartels at mbartels@space.com or follow her on Twitter @meganbartels. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.