Laurie Leshin on being first, being right about taking a chance and breaking free of limits

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Laurie Leshin, 57 | Space Scientist, Leader, Academic | Los Angeles?

Photos of Mars' surface jolted then-10-year-old Laurie Leshin in her mom's kitchen, launching a lifelong fascination with space. Those photos, a chance internship and ongoing efforts to learn vaulted Leshin into leadership roles in academia, including as the first woman president of Worcester Polytechnic Institute, then to the fore in 2022 as the first woman to oversee NASA's 86-year-old Jet Propulsion Lab. In between, she gained master's and doctoral degrees in geochemistry from Caltech, served on presidential commissions, joined NASA, left NASA and returned as the director of the JPL. Oh, and Tom Hanks has something to do with all this, too.

Leshin's answers from a conversation with LinkedIn News were lightly edited for clarity in this as-told-to format:

I basically grew up on the campus of Arizona State.

My dad is now retired but was a cardiologist. He, I, come from a family of doctors on my dad's side. My uncle, and my grandfather, were all physicians. And I was supposed to be the doctor. Turned out to not be that kind of doctor.

My mom was a school teacher when she was younger, as women tended to be. Then she was home with us kids for a while before going back to school at ASU when my parents split when I was nine. She got her master's in counseling and then worked at the university for about 10 years. And so that's one of the reasons I grew up on the campus: I used to go to classes with her and when she was working on campus.

I have two brothers. I am the oldest; as if people can't tell (laughs).

I have always been fascinated by space from the minute I saw the first pictures of the surface of Mars from the Viking lander when I was 10 years old, standing in my mother's kitchen, looking at Time Magazine.?

I was just transfixed by the rocks. I think growing up in the desert, that landscape just felt very engaging to me. But it never occurred to me I could have a job working in the space program. It wasn't that I grew up like, I'm going to be an astronaut or I'm going to be a space scientist. That was not it. I was the editor of my high school yearbook, so I was thinking about journalism for a while.

But science and math were always very interesting to me.

When I turned 16, I got a job in the registrar's office at ASU.

This was in the '80s, before the internet. There was an 800 number that people could call if they had questions. Parents would call or a student would ask, how do I get a transcript? That was the best training to be a college president. I knew the entire university by the end of a year or two because I had to figure out where to direct all these calls. I was the 800-number for ASU (laughs).

It was my first big view of organizations.

My mom is a huge figure in my life. She passed away in the summer of '21. She started in this very traditional role. Married the good Jewish doctor, was checking the boxes.

When I was six, we were living in Dallas before we moved to Arizona. She was going to National Organization for Women meetings and organizing around the passage of the Equal Rights Amendment, marching and organizing, and taking me with her to these meetings. I don't have many memories of this. I have some memories of being in rooms with a bunch of what we might call 'uppity' women who were standing on their chairs, stomping their feet and pretty fired up.

I did not understand at the time what it was all about.?

But I now know that they were doing that so that I can do this. And I do feel that standing on the shoulders of the early women's movement. It's something I benefited from incredibly.

She transformed as a result of that. It was very much, Laurie, you can do anything you want. And that was the message I grew up with, and my father agreed with that.

Getting Set to Take Off

I had a summer internship at NASA when I was 19. That was the lightning bolt.

Spring of my sophomore year at ASU,? I'm standing outside the chemistry office looking at summer internship opportunities and wondering. Most of them you had to be a graduating student.

There was this one at the Lunar and Planetary Institute, which is this little science institute that sits right next to Johnson Space Center in Houston. It had all these potential areas of research like interplanetary dust particles, and the late heavy bombardment of the moon.

I knew what all the words were, but I didn't understand what any of them meant. And there was one application form on it. I pulled the whole thing off the corkboard, and I cold-called the only woman full professor in the physical sciences at that time at ASU.

She was in astrophysics. A woman named Sue Wyckoff, who I had never met. My mom knew of her and was bugging me to go see her. I was like, Mom, what am I gonna talk to her about?

I walked to her office, I knocked on the door and I said, I'm Laurie Leshin, I'm interested in this internship, but I don't know what to do. Can you help me?

I can still see her in my mind. She dropped what she was doing, she physically dropped what was in her hand, and she said, of course, come in, sit down. We talked for half an hour.

She's saying, oh, this is what this could be, this would be great. She kept saying, 'I wish I knew somebody there. I would just call 'em.' Finally, she says, well, let's just call them. She picks up the phone and she dials the number. I hear her get some assistant and ask, 'Who's in charge of the intern program?'

She knows him. So then she's connected to this guy that was co-chairing the program that summer and she says, 'How's your lovely wife, Cheryl? I have this fabulous student sitting here…' who she'd known for all of half an hour at this point. And, you know, boom.

He picked me as his intern. I had good grades. I had a good record. It wasn't unprecedented. But it was a great example of two things. One, the network matters, right? And putting yourself out there, that 20 seconds of courage that you knock on somebody's door that you don't know, just to try and see, figure something out.

I used to say this all the time when I was running a university: faculty can change the trajectory of somebody's life in a half-an-hour meeting. It changed my life.?

That summer, I got to go work on data from the Viking mission that had so inspired me when I was a 10-year-old kid.?

It's Academic

After that internship, I went back [to school], and I got a job working for a professor.?

I was on my little traditional academic path, which brought me back to ASU as a faculty member after working in southern California.

When the space shuttle Columbia was lost, it was very much a soul-searching moment for NASA. [President George W. Bush] came to NASA headquarters and gave a speech about the future of the space program in January 2004. That had never happened before.

A bunch of us faculty were sitting in a conference room in Arizona watching the speech because this was a big deal. We were all NASA-funded researchers, and we care about the agency.

He talked about putting a presidential commission together to help him think about the future of the agency. I remember thinking at the time, wow, that'd be a cool committee to be on.

Through a long series of events that included help from the then-director of JPL — the person who sat literally in this office, who was a mentor of mine — I ended up on that presidential commission. It was an amazing experience.?

There were nine of us. I was the youngest. And most of them had had these multiple experiences. They had worked in the public sector, in the private sector and not-for-profits and universities. They had this ability to come in and see the field.

Some of these folks were not space people. [But] they could see how this is all working together with recommendations that we can make that will both be implementable and politically palatable.?

A couple of them pulled me aside at the end and said, Laurie, you're smart and you've got a lot of potential, but you need to broaden your experience.

I had worked on university campuses my entire life since I was 16, never worked anywhere else except the 10 weeks I spent at NASA as a summer intern. It was limiting.?

They said to be open to possibilities because you'll probably have some after serving on this presidential commission. Sure enough, six months later, NASA came calling and said, why don't you just come help us implement some of these recommendations? Don't just throw them over the fence.?

My husband and I ditched our tenure and moved across the country and joined the government.

That was a very pivotal thing for me and not easy.?

I went from running a research group and a research center of maybe 15 people to running the science organization at NASA Goddard [in Maryland], which is the largest science center on the East Coast. It had 600 civil servants and a thousand contractors working in it every day. That was by far the biggest leap in my career in terms of somebody taking a chance on me to run something big.

Upward with NASA

This story involves Tom Hanks.

I got married, moved across the country, and started a new job within about five months, which was dumb. I don't recommend that.

Among the emotions [of joining NASA and leaving academia] was fear for sure. But also excitement about what could happen. It was a big change.

I've always been opportunistic in a good way. To me, the key is you should learn to recognize good opportunities and get the judgment about when to leap. You learn that by not always leaping correctly.

Before [we moved], I was newly married, thinking about this opportunity and thought, oh my gosh, I've worked my whole life to get tenure which I'd just gotten a couple of years prior. I had my lab finally up and going, I had a path to leadership at the university. I was starting to lead some bigger things there.

And my husband says, let's watch 'From the Earth to the Moon' again.?

He had the mini-series on DVD or videotape. Every night for a week and a half, we watched. It's about the beginnings of the space program and what's possible.

Tom Hanks produced it. He's very much a space geek.?

He was at a premier of this IMAX movie that he helped do called 'Desolation Moon' at the Air and Space Museum a couple of years after we had gone to NASA. I didn't get to meet him because they had him off in the VIP area.

We're leaving, driving out of the garage underneath the Smithsonian after this thing. And there he is. He comes out of the elevator with this little entourage and they're just standing there waiting for their car. And I look at my husband and he looks at me, and he pulls the car into a parking space.

We jump out of the car and we go right up to him and we're like, 'Hi, we wanted to meet you.' I told him I came to NASA because of 'From the Earth to the Moon.' He's like, that is amazing (laughs). And he was just the nicest guy about it.

Managing as a Manager

I am a big L learner. That's something that feeds me. I come out of that academic tradition, and I just love to figure out new things. My lens on the world is as a scientist, so I see new knowledge and new things to figure out as exciting.?

[Managing] is about people, but a lot of it's also about setting a vision and a strategy. Figure out how to articulate that in a way that helps people see themselves within it.?

A big learning for me in that first big job was it's not just about what you can see ahead, but it's also sometimes about what you need to let go of in the past.

That is a lesson that I have carried forward with me in every role that I have had. But that's about people. It's about figuring out how to work with them, how to take the place as you find it and then help it move forward.

You don't get to start with a clean sheet of paper very often.

Priorities is a good word, right? It's something we've been working on here since I arrived [at JPL]. They have a very, very long to-do list and it's too long.

The easiest way to get people to do what you want is to have it be aligned with their values and the institution's values.

A group of us changed the promotion and tenure system at the university I just came from. People will tell you that's impossible. You can't do that. You can't change promotion and tenure. It's like the third rail of academia.?

You can, if you point out that there is a disconnect between the stated values of the institution and even the unstated values. You try to make those invisible values visible.

And try to paint that picture for people in a compelling way. A lot of people will slowly and over time change their behavior. You can also work to change the systems that they behave within.?

I've been lucky. The space business is full of really, really passionate people. I used to always say people work at NASA because they can't imagine working anywhere else. That's less true today because there are a lot more really interesting space places to work, which is awesome.?

But people come here because they have a passion to explore the unknown. And so at some level, it's a pretty easy thing to get people excited. Our job is to try and enable them to be amazing because they already have a ton of talent and capability.

There's a unique thing about JPL: we're not a NASA center like NASA Goddard is. We're not an organization of civil servants and we're not independent either. We are Caltech employees. We're operated by a fabulous, amazing university that I happen to be an alumna of.?

But, Caltech and I do not believe the leadership there fully understood that we did not have paid parental leave for our staff. They had it for faculty at Caltech. [But] the staff on campus didn't have it either. So it wasn't just the staff at JPL.

And as soon as I said this to the president, he said, 'Yes, they do.'?

And I said, 'No, no, they don't.'

'What?'

It's not a great story in that way, like, oh, I worked so hard. No, no. It's sometimes just about shining a light, right? And that's sometimes what representation can do: just helps you see things a bit differently.?

There's always money involved and we had to figure it out. But, once everybody was like, what, this is not in line with our values, we need to do something here, then we got it done pretty quickly.

It's crucial to find some of those nuggets. It's not a little thing, it's a huge thing. But it's one policy. It's one change that makes a huge difference and demonstrates huge commitment.?

It's about being competitive in the marketplace and it's about doing the right thing. I've tried to keep young families here. I mean, it's challenging enough in LA with the cost of living and the wonderful commuting.

We've got more to do.

Being First and Diverse

I was the first [woman] in both [my last job and in charge at JPL]. There's this pent up possibility that gets unleashed [when that happens]. It means that people can see themselves, that they see barriers coming down, they see possibility. I think that's amazing.

But I believe there is extra scrutiny. I also believe some of that is self-imposed, too. There is an extra weight because you don't want to mess it up.

Let's just say a majority male that was sitting in the world. If they messed it up, it would be about them. If I messed it up, it would be about how women can't do the job. So you are more of a representative of the group that you come from, I believe, when you're the first.

You have to constantly remind yourself to be open-minded and open-eared. I think that's a good way to say it, and it's even true for me because I have worked in such a male-dominated field for so long.?

It's interesting: in my last role, we diversified the student body and it's a very project-based place where teams work together a lot. We started doing these interventions with the first-year students in their teams to help them work better in diverse teams.

We kept finding the guys were doing the technical work and the women were working on the communication. So we started a conversation within each team about what strengths you bring and what you want to learn from this experience. Where might you have an opportunity to gain a skill?

Once people laid that out, and we gave them a little bit of unconscious bias training too, just to get that in their heads, we found incredible results.

It changed the way people thought about roles on the team. And those are the kind of things that we've got to get better at doing in the workplace. Just assuming diverse teams are going to operate effectively is not OK. It's not good enough just to have diversity. To have inclusion, you have to have things set up to succeed.

It's a lot of human nature that is hard to overcome.

From the Earth to the Moon to…

The important thing to know if you're going to have an asteroid named after you is that it's not going to hit Earth. It's one of the ones that are way out there in the asteroid belt out beyond Mars. So nobody needs to worry about 4922 Leshin (laughs).?

Space exploration is synonymous with the future of humanity at this point. That is what NASA is representing to people, but it's so much more than NASA.

I hope that we'll all be a part of a space-faring species where it isn't just NASA astronauts and a few very wealthy private individuals who get to fly to space.?

And I think in our lifetimes, that is going to change. There are going to be many, many more people who get to go to space and the changes that could bring to our world are pretty exciting to think about. I'm really happy that we continue to push the boundaries, and as more commercial activities are happening near Earth, NASA then gets to focus on the frontier.

They're focused on the moon again right now, and then eventually Mars. We get to do that with the robotics spacecraft and then humans will come behind. It's going to be a really exciting few decades ahead for NASA, but also just more broadly for the space industry. It's fundamentally transforming.

I'm trying to find them. Just a little microscopic kind. I want to find them on Mars, I want to find them on other planets. Searching for life is a big part of what we do here. That's a transformative discovery that will happen in the next decade or two. We will be answering that question about whether we are alone. So exciting.