Scientists Don’t Have to Be Heroes

How NASA and ASU Astronomer Lindy Elkins-Tanton Is Dismantling the Personality-Driven Culture of the Research Laboratory

Two decades ago, NASA’s Psyche mission principal investigator and ASU Interplanetary Initiative vice president Lindy Elkins-Tanton was working toward her PhD at MIT. It was a place she loved, but also one that she reflected could feel like “a series of warring city-states among the faculty.”

This pressure-cooker situation, with fellow scientists locked in a constant fight for their results to get funding and their names to garner respect, is common in university research settings around the world. In a recent piece published by Issues in Science and Technology titled “Time …