Lindsay Hays

Dr. Lindsay Hays grew up in Florida watching rocket launches from her yard, but it was a random library book plucked from a shelf that first inspired her to do science for NASA.

“It talked about how you could see into the past by looking at stars that were really, really far away,” Hays said. “The concept that we can look billions of years into the past by looking at stars, and realizing just how big space was, and just how much there was out there, and how much different stuff existed in the universe — some of which we think we understand and some of which is still beyond our capabilities to understand — totally blew my mind as an 8-year-old. I was hooked.”

When I was in college, I knew I was interested in the way we can look at the history of our planet, Earth, and the history of life on this planet, and that neither of those things is a story in isolation. The history of life on our planet is the history of both the planet and the history of life. And those two things — the surface of the planet and the living things on it — evolved together and in tandem. I knew it was something I wanted to study. I quickly learned that the biology department was focused on other types of research, but the Earth sciences department got it, and I was lucky to find some amazing professors — Sam Bowring and Roger Summons, among others — who were interested in studying just this kind of thing.

While I was an undergrad, I did two summer internships at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and I just loved the idea of exploration. I loved the idea of not just understanding this planet, but trying to understand other planets, and other environments where life may have arisen, by studying the life on this planet and then trying to go out into the solar system, and beyond, and actually study those places themselves.

I stayed at the same school for my Ph.D. that I attended for my undergrad, and after that I did a research postdoc to try to decide whether or not a job in academia was for me. At a poster session at a small conference, I met Mary Voytek, then NASA’s Senior Scientist for Astrobiology (the study of the origin, evolution, and distribution of life in the universe). I basically said to her, "Look, I don't think research or being a professor is for me. What is your job at NASA Headquarters like?” She told me about another postdoc opportunity — this time in management —  and I applied for it, and was selected. So, I jumped into my NASA career as a postdoc at NASA Headquarters, and getting that kind of 30,000-foot view showed me how many moving pieces there are (even in just NASA's Planetary Science Division), and how they all work together. That perspective was really my start in the space program and at NASA.

As the Senior Scientist for Mars Exploration, I am responsible for providing scientific leadership for the Mars Exploration Program and the Mars Sample Return Program. There is a lot of history to our exploration of Mars at NASA, and there is so much future potential. My job is making sure that the things we're doing on Mars now are tracking from where we've been and helping to set us up where we want to go.

That includes Mars Sample Return — this unprecedented step in returning samples from another planet – planning for the science of these returned samples and making sure we are maximizing the science that we could do with each and every grain. My job also includes thinking about what's next after Mars Sample Return. What are the next types of scientific exploration we want to do with the Red Planet? How do we prepare ourselves for humans to explore the Red Planet? What is the science we need to do now?

Talk to everybody you can about how they got to where they are, what their day-to-day work is like, what they love about their jobs, and what they don't like. It's remarkable what you'll find out about what opportunities there are. I have had a career path that is not totally typical, and it was only by talking to people about their jobs that I found something that really fit what I like to do.

I have found that it's easy, since everyone comes up in the academic world, to get a narrow view and think that academia is the only place to be a scientist. It took me a long time to realize there are a lot of different ways to be a scientist. There are a lot more people involved in this business of science and engineering and space exploration than just people who work in labs. There are a lot of different jobs at NASA, for example, and a lot of different jobs in the field of science that play to different people's strengths.

I have to give credit for getting me on this path to my high school biology teacher, Dr. Lisa Raiford. I was not a great student in elementary school. In middle school I really started to find my place in my classes and I found things that were more interesting to me, and I started to learn how to focus on what I wanted to do.

But it wasn't really until high school that I realized how much I really loved the sciences, specifically biology; understanding the complexity of life on this planet, and the multitude of ways life has evolved to take up the different niches that it does. Dr. Raiford was a really great teacher, and she got her Ph.D. while she was teaching high school biology! Her classes were interesting and very fun. She was a fantastic inspiration for me.

I'm from Jupiter, Florida, which is a great place to be from if you're interested in space and space exploration. Jupiter is a few hours south of Kennedy Space Center, which means that when I was growing up, you could see Space Shuttle launches. If it was dark out, you could see the light from the engines. If it was light out, you'd often see the exhaust trail as astronauts were launched into space. So that was just a very cool thing about growing up there — you were reminded regularly that there were people going into space — or in space! — at that very moment.

In addition to my background in science, I got a minor in literature because it was nice to be able to read some Jane Austen, for example, as part of my work as an undergrad, and to just think about the world in a very different way. I really enjoyed it, even though it didn’t help with the required workload for my major!

I love to travel. At this point, I've been lucky enough to visit to all the continents except Antarctica and Africa, and those are certainly on my soon-to-visit list.

I love hiking. I have two kids and we try to go — along with my husband — on weekly hikes. Being outside is certainly one of my favorite things.

This is the picture that the Perseverance rover took that confirmed the first successful sample collection - taken after our first attempt at sampling a different rock turned out to have drilled into a sample that was too soft and didn’t actually collect any rock in the tube. This image shows how the exploration process happens – learning from things that didn’t work as expected and figuring out how to it better the next time – and is the most consistent way to succeed. And in this case, was a major step in the process of Mars Sample Return!