JPL Director Laurie Leshin (PhD ‘94) Welcomes New Students to Caltech

Laurie Leshin at Convocation. Photo: Lance Hayashinda/Caltech

At Convocation, the director of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) encouraged students to live a passionate life of discovery and exploration as they begin their lives at the Institute.

Laurie Leshin (PhD ‘94), Vice President and Director of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory; and Bren Professor of Geochemistry and Planetary Science, was the keynote speaker at the Convocation ceremony held September 18 in Beckman Auditorium. This transcript of her remarks has been edited for clarity.

Good morning and welcome. It's great to see you all, this wonderful auditorium full of excited hearts and minds ready to embark on your Caltech journey. Are you excited? We're going to talk about cool space stuff this morning if that's OK with you. As I do that, I'm going to [tell] a bit of a personal story about something that I care a lot about.

The joy of discovery, I think, is a great theme. I often talk about this as the passionate pursuit of discovery. I think that people who aren't involved in STEM think of scientists and engineers as people who methodically learn things and get things done without a lot of passion and emotion, right? What we know—and what you'll discover even more than you already have on your path here now that you're here to engage in this incredibly passionate community—is that gaining new knowledge is about passion. It's a passionate pursuit, not a passionless pursuit. And I'll give you a couple of examples of that.

But first, allow me to give a little bit of a personal background. I [finished] my PhD here in 1994. Someone's going to say ’95. I defended in October ’94, and I walked across the stage in June of ’95.

So that's me in middle school. My brothers tortured me with that picture for years. So, I just decided to own it as me, my nerdy middle-school self in all my glory. And then, I just started at JPL just over a year ago, and I am really honored to be the 10th director of the lab and the first woman to run JPL.

JPL is a unique place in that it's the only asset installation operated by somebody other than NASA. JPL is operated by Caltech. I'm a Caltech employee. All 6,500 of my colleagues at JPL are Caltech employees. We are part of this campus community. I'm so thrilled to be here to welcome you today, to get to talk a bit about some of the kinds of work we do, but also to make sure that you know that you are now part of the JPL community too, in addition to the Caltech community.

For me, this journey has a lot of lessons, one of which I'll focus on today, which is about being inspired by the big questions of being passionate about pursuing new knowledge. The other two I often talk about, which I won't talk much about today because we don't have that much time, are mentors and advocates.

For you all just starting on your journey here, you have arrived at a place full of potential mentors and advocates who love the idea that they can help change the trajectory of your life. You've already done incredible things, or you wouldn't be sitting here. For the people who work here at Caltech, on campus and in the lab, one of the things that gives us the most joy is to see you succeed. For me, when I was 19 and an undergraduate at Arizona State, I had seen a flyer for a NASA summer internship. I had no idea what most of the words meant. And I cold called a faculty member to say, ‘Can you please help me?’ And I can still in my mind see her at that time, back in the Dark Ages. She was one of the only woman full professors in STEM at the university. But I can still see her dropping what she was doing and saying, ‘Come in, let's talk about this. Let me help you.’ And I did get that NASA summer internship, and it did change my life.

That is a great example of what faculty can do to help support you, and advocate for you, and not just shine a light in a direction for you but help kick down doors and help make things happen. So please do take advantage of the extraordinary faculty and staff as well as folks at JPL to help light the way for you.

The other one I often talk about is about cultivating judgment about which opportunities to take. You are going to be faced with a huge number of possible things you can get involved in here. Of course, as new college students, even you graduate students, I encourage you to feel engaged in this community. It's incredible. But start to get smart about those things that are both going to bring you joy and fulfill a passion, and also will help advance you, help you learn something new, help push and stretch you.

Be careful. Keep it in balance. Don’t overdo it. The academics are intense, so make sure you watch out for yourself. But some of the most interesting things in my own career have come from when I picked up the phone, and it’s been a bit out of left field, and I’ve gotten involved with something that has taken me in a whole new direction. Just be open to that kind of experience.

The first color picture of Mars sent back to Earth by the Viking missions. Courtesy NASA

The one I want to talk about the most is this thing about being inspired by big questions. For me, that started as a 10-year-old girl. I’m a little too young to remember Apollo and I hope you all know what that is. Remember, I was a 10-year-old girl growing up in Phoenix, Arizona, when Viking landed on Mars in the mid-1970s. And I, to this day, have a distinct memory of opening Time magazine and seeing that weird looking picture, which is actually this picture right here from the Viking landers, and just feeling like, oh my gosh. I was hit by a lightning bolt. I wanted to reach out and touch those rocks. I was fascinated. I was riveted. It was like, oh, that’s it. I’m going to be a space person no matter what. I had a lot of interests, but that always stuck with me. And I’m thrilled to say that I have built a career around helping enable myself and others to study cool Mars rocks. And we’re still working on that today at JPL.

But that journey is not without bumps in the road. In fact, it is those bumps in the road; it’s the tough times followed by the success. I love what Alex [Burr, a fourth-year undergraduate and chair of the undergraduate Academics and Research Committee] said about that excitement of discovery. I have definitely had moments on this campus where I've run around with a really silly plot in my hand, with data just being a correlation, for days. And every single person I saw, I said, “Did you see this? Do you see this line?” It's so exciting. Those moments are great. Those moments also pair with moments of deep drama and fear that it's just all going to be a challenge and maybe not going to work, including some failures along the way.

STS-125 promotional poster. Courtesy NASA

I'm going to share with you a couple of different experiences around that. And the first actually has to do with the Hubble Space Telescope. We all love the JWST [James Webb Space Telescope]. We call that scope the new one, but Hubble is like the OG awesome space telescope.

The cool thing about Hubble is that it could be serviced by astronauts in the space shuttle back in the day. In addition to working in academia in my career, I've also worked at NASA before, and I worked at another part of NASA in Maryland [called] Goddard, which was actually in charge of the very last time that astronauts went to service the Hubble telescope, which was in 2009.

Anyway, the stars of our show today, of the story that I'm about to tell you, is this guy, [Andrew J. Feustel], who was out spacewalking to help fix the Hubble. He was out there with this guy, John M. Grunsfeld, who by the way was a postdoc at Caltech. And they’re talking to this guy, Mike Massamino, who some of you might know from his turn on The Big Bang Theory, but you'll hear his voice in some of the videos I'm about to show you. So, what were we trying to do when we were fixing Hubble? I was in mission control while this was happening. It’s a decade-long process to plan these missions, and we're doing a bunch of stuff on that mission—replacing some batteries and some gyroscopes and things. But the cool thing we're doing is upgrading Hubble’s instruments.

The telescope is fine, but over time, the cameras become out of date, just like why you buy a new cell phone. So, we were installing a spectrograph, which is awesome. My husband actually worked on that. And this camera is the size of a baby grand piano. The way this works is that it weighs about 700 pounds on Earth, but in space it's weightless. And so, it's just held in the telescope by one bolt. So, the first thing the astronauts do when they go out on the first of five spacewalks is undo that bolt, pull out the old camera, and put in the new camera. And that's where the trouble began. They couldn't get the bolts [undone].

They have all these very fancy astronaut tools. They kind of look like a drill that you would use at home, but it's got sensors on it. They don't want to strip the bolt, right? If you strip the bolt, the old camera stays in Hubble, and the new camera comes home with the space shuttle. And so, for hours, they were trying to get this bolt unstuck. And I'll tell you, people in mission control were crying. So, that’s the passionate pursuit of knowledge. These are people who had for 10 years worked to build this new camera and get it safely up to Hubble, and they might have had to bring it home.

That is when you start to see the passionate commitment that people have—weekends away from their families to make this happen. That’s passion. There's nobody in lab coats with a stern face saying, “Oh, well, I guess it didn't work.” This is passion, right? So that's a little bit of a dated example, but I was there for that. And so, to me, the concept of teams coming together to go after bigger things than any of us can do alone, that is a beautiful thing that NASA does and Caltech does. And just knowing that there are bumps along the road, but the teams come together in those moments to get us all through those bumps.

I want to show you a little bit more recent example with this girl. Everybody knows her name, [the Mars rover] Perseverance. This is Perseverance. There she is on the surface of Mars with her friend, the Ingenuity helicopter. Anybody following the Ingenuity helicopter? Thank you. Very proud of this work, which was all done at JPL before I got there, by the way. So, I take no actual credit in this, but this was the first time we'd ever attempted to fly a helicopter on another world. And I just want to show you that very first day, which was the middle of COVID.

This was April 2021. We landed Percy [Perseverance] in February of 2021, and she dropped the helicopter right next to her there. This was right before the first flight. I want to just show you again the team of people that come together with passion, trying to do something that's never been done before.

This is an absolutely incredible thing that happened, especially in the middle of the pandemic. But you can see, I hope you could see the nervousness even with the masks, right? You could see the nervousness on the team, and then to get that incredible data—just extraordinary.

And, by the way, that's only one of the very many missions we work on at JPL. We study Mars obviously a lot. You know us for Mars rovers, but we work on telescopes. We do a ton of work on our home planet of Earth, trying to understand how it's changing and evolving, and what we might do about that.

I just want to close by talking about how in many ways, each of you is like the Ingenuity helicopter. You are ready for takeoff, and you've got an amazing team of people backing you and waiting to support you in your success. And I hope you approach your first year here and all the years after with the same kind of joy and passion that we try and do each and every day at NASA. And that your colleagues here at Caltech really try and do. We're here to support you. We are excited for your success, and I want to make sure you know that just 5 miles up the road is JPL. I'm sure we'll figure out ways to interact with lots of you. We have internships; we work with the SURF [Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship] program. If you're interested in getting involved with JPL, starting to talk with the student programs here, [the Student-Faculty Programs office], is a good way to do that. Or go online and look for internships at JPL.

Ingenuity, you saw its first flight—this week, it just took its 59th flight on Mars. And you'll be flying again and again and again too. I'm excited for you, and welcome to Caltech. Enjoy your first term. Thank you, all.