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Lindsay Hays is a Program Scientist in the Planetary Science Division (PSD) at NASA Headquarters. She is the Deputy Program Scientist for the Astrobiology Program and the Program lead for Organizational Excellence. Lindsay is also the lead Program Officer for the Exobiology and Habitable Worlds research program, and the PSD representative for the Future Investigators in NASA Earth and Space Science and Technology (FINESST) program for graduate research.

Lindsay first worked at NASA as an undergraduate summer intern for two summers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. For her graduate and postdoctoral work, using organic geochemistry, she studied lipid biomarkers for environmental conditions at major biological transition points in Earth’s history including mass extinction and radiation events. After this time in academic research, she returned to NASA as a one-year postdoctoral fellow at NASA Headquarters in the Astrobiology Program where she served as the Editor-in-Chief for the 2015 Astrobiology Strategy. She then returned to JPL, working in the Mars Program Office where she was the Sample Return Science System Engineer and also worked on science activities for Humans to Mars.

Lindsay earned her bachelor’s and doctorate degrees from the Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences department at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with her PhD thesis research titled “Biogeochemical Proxies for Environmental and Biotic Conditions at the Permian-Triassic Boundary”. After graduate school, Lindsay was a postdoctoral researcher at Harvard University, where she received the Agouron Geobiology Postdoctoral Fellowship, and a NASA Postdoctoral Management Program fellow at NASA HQ.

Lindsay enjoys being outdoors – running or hiking, whether the weather cooperates or not – and cooking, baking, and generally experimenting in the kitchen. She is often joined in these adventures by her husband and two young children.