Laurie Leshin formally assumes her roles as director of NASA JPL and vice chairman of Caltech in Might.
Credit score: Picture Courtesy Worcester Polytechnic Institute
The distinguished geochemist and house scientist brings greater than 20 years of management expertise in tutorial and authorities service to JPL.
Laurie Leshin, president of Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI), has been appointed director of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) and vice chairman of Caltech. Leshin will formally assume her place on Might 16, 2022, succeeding Michael Watkins, who retired in August 2021, and Lt. Gen. Larry D. James USAF (Ret.), who at present serves as JPL interim director.
She joins JPL from WPI, one of many nation’s oldest personal STEM universities, the place she has served as president since 2014. She is the primary lady president within the college’s 150-year historical past and might be JPL’s first feminine director.
“Laurie Leshin stood out in an exhaustive worldwide search due to her profound dedication to folks, her strategic method to scientific and technological alternatives, her deep appreciation of NASA’s management in house exploration and Earth science, her mastery of advanced organizations, and her potential to encourage the subsequent technology of scientists and engineers,” says Caltech president Thomas F. Rosenbaum, the Sonja and William Davidow Presidential Chair and professor of physics. “We're so happy to have the ability to welcome Laurie again to campus and to JPL.”
“NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory has a storied historical past of defying what was as soon as thought unimaginable within the area of house exploration. On this new period of groundbreaking discoveries and fixed innovation, it's clear that Dr. Laurie Leshin has a monitor report of scholarship and management wanted to function director of JPL and cement the middle’s standing as a worldwide chief within the twenty first century,” says NASA Administrator Invoice Nelson. “Beneath Dr. Leshin, the know-how invented at JPL will proceed to permit people to discover the locations in our universe that we can't but attain and spark the imaginations of future mathematicians, engineers, and pioneers in school rooms throughout America. I would like thank Mike Watkins and Gen. Larry James for his or her contributions that the JPL group will construct on for many years to return.”
Laurie Leshin, second from left, celebrates the touchdown of NASA’s Curiosity rover on August 5, 2012, with different members of the science groups at JPL. Leshin is a co-Investigator on two of the rover’s devices, the Pattern Evaluation at Mars (SAM) instrument and the Alpha Particle X-Ray Spectrometer (APXS). She beforehand served as a long-term planner on the mission.
Credit score: NASA/JPL-Caltech
Leshin is an internationally acknowledged scientist whose profession has spanned academia and senior positions at NASA, and included two White Home appointments. She has been lauded for her barrier-breaking management within the house business and in academia in addition to for her accomplishments as a distinguished geochemist and house scientist.
“I'm each thrilled and humbled to be appointed the director of JPL. In some ways, this seems like a homecoming. A few of the most impactful experiences of my profession have taken place on the Caltech campus and at JPL – classes discovered and objectives achieved which have formed me as a pacesetter and an area scientist. The chance to return to working carefully with so many colleagues throughout Caltech – on the Lab and on campus – and at NASA is a dream come true,” Leshin says. “We have now huge alternatives forward to leverage JPL’s world management in robotic house exploration to reply awe-inspiring scientific questions and enhance life right here on Earth. I stay up for my work with Caltech and NASA to make sure that JPL continues to drive innovation throughout the worldwide house ecosystem. Lastly, I'm particularly honored to be the primary lady to carry the title of director of JPL. I do know from private expertise that various groups make larger influence, and I'll work every single day to make sure that JPL is a spot the place all belong and thrive. We are going to dare mighty issues, collectively.”
In 2005, she turned director of science and exploration at NASA’s Goddard House Flight Heart, and in 2008, she was promoted to Goddard’s deputy director for science and know-how, the place she and colleagues have been liable for the technique, planning, and implementation of greater than 50 Earth and house flight initiatives. In 2010, Leshin assumed the function of deputy affiliate administrator of the Exploration Techniques Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters, the place her work concerned the oversight of the longer term human spaceflight program, together with efforts to determine business crew capabilities and parts of what's now the Artemis program. In that function, Leshin additionally labored to catalyze worldwide house exploration by participating with worldwide house organizations and firms, and thru creating new applied sciences and robotic missions to create new potentialities for people to journey to locations deeper within the photo voltaic system. Leshin left NASA in 2011 to affix Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute as dean of the Faculty of Science.
At WPI, Leshin targeted on increasing analysis, WPI’s signature World Initiatives Program, and methods to handle gender disparity in STEM. As well as, throughout her presidential tenure, new tutorial and collaboration areas have been developed on the WPI campus, notably a 40,000-square-foot Innovation Studio, with versatile, artistic house for lively studying school rooms, and the newly opened Unity Corridor, a 100,000-square-foot tutorial constructing targeted on robotics engineering, information science, cybersecurity, studying sciences and know-how, and different rising interdisciplinary applications. WPI is now amongst STEM establishments with the best proportion of feminine undergraduate college students and is acknowledged for its stability of excellence in instructing and groundbreaking analysis.
Alongside her administrative profession, Leshin has continued her scientific endeavors, that are targeted on deciphering the report of water on objects in our photo voltaic system. For instance, she served as a member of the Mars Science Laboratory science group that analyzed information collected by the Curiosity rover to search out proof of water on the floor of Mars. She has additionally been concerned in planning and advocating for Mars Pattern Return missions for greater than twenty years.
Raised in Arizona, Leshin earned a bachelor’s diploma in chemistry from Arizona State College (ASU), adopted by grasp’s and doctoral levels in geochemistry from Caltech. After a postdoctoral fellowship at UCLA, she served as a professor of geological sciences at ASU and director of its Heart for Meteorite Research. Earlier than leaving ASU for NASA, she led the formation of ASU’s pathbreaking Faculty of Earth and House Exploration.
Leshin is a recipient of NASA’s Excellent Management Medal and Distinguished Public Service Medal, and of the Meteoritical Society’s Nier Prize, awarded for excellent analysis in meteoritics or planetary science by a scientist underneath the age of 35. The Worldwide Astronomical Union acknowledged her contributions to planetary science with the naming of asteroid 4922 Leshin.
In 2004, Leshin served on President George W. Bush’s Fee on Implementation of United States House Exploration Coverage, a nine-member fee charged with advising the president on the execution of his new Imaginative and prescient for House Exploration. In 2013, President Barack Obama appointed Leshin to the advisory board of the Smithsonian Establishment’s Nationwide Air and House Museum. Since 2016, she has co-chaired the Nationwide Academies Authorities-College-Trade Analysis Roundtable.
In 2021, Leshin acquired Caltech’s Distinguished Alumni Award, which is bestowed yearly by the Institute in recognition of private and professional accomplishments which have made a noteworthy influence in a area, neighborhood, or society extra broadly.
A committee composed of Caltech trustees, school, senior administrative leaders, and two members of the JPL neighborhood carried out an intensive search and beneficial Leshin to Caltech’s president. JPL, which was based by Caltech school and college students in 1936, has been managed by Caltech on behalf of NASA since 1958.
Interim director Lt. Gen. James will resume his place as deputy director when Leshin formally assumes her place.
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