Hi I'm Laurie lesson. As of june 1st I will be the president of Worcester
polytechnic institute in Worcester Mass. And I graduated from CSU in 1987
with a degree in chemistry. I have a very vivid memory of being a 10 year
old in my mother's kitchen, seeing the pictures from the viking Landers on
the surface of MArs in the mid seventies and wanting to reach out and
touch those rocks. I think it's partly because I grew up here in the
desert that that environment on MArs felt very familiar to me and I really
wanted to be a part of that. And so that's one of my earliest memories
about loving space and loving science. So the real, so after I saw the
pictures from MArs when I was 10 years old I actually kind of forgot about
it. I had a lot of different interests and uh a lot of things I was
thinking that I might want to do. But when I was here at A. S. U. I was
fortunate enough through the help of a professor here to get a summer
internship at Nasa between my sophomore and junior years. And when I got
to do space research and I actually got to study MArs that same mission
that I had seen the pictures of as a 10 year old. And so it was a
fantastic opportunity for me to get to see what real research was like.
And for me it was like a lightning bolt that was it. That was what I
wanted to spend my scientific career doing after I came back from my
summer at Nasa when I was a junior here first I was thinking I might have
to change my major because most of the people who I worked with were
geologists not chemists and I had never taken any geology courses. So I
but instead of extending my time here as a student I stayed in chemistry
and started to do research and realized that issue was actually one of the
few places that had professors who were jointly appointed in chemistry and
geology. So even back then in the mid eighties the interdisciplinary cross
disciplinary trans disciplinary sense of a issue was coming through and I
got to take advantage of that doing research for the chemistry professor
but learning about geoscience and Space science and doing it. So as a
scientist when I came back from my Nasa experience as a summer intern as
an undergraduate I started doing that undergraduate research. I needed to
go to grad school. I knew I wanted to get a PhD and so I chose to go to
caltech which had a wonderful program in geochemistry. Again crossing
those boundaries between chemistry and geology that I could apply to space
science. So I studied meteorites which is kind of a place where
geochemistry and space science come together. Um and then did a very
traditional academic path. Actually did a postdoctoral fellowship at U. C
. L. A. Came back to you as a professor which was such a thrill to get to
come home to me um here on the campus where I was able to do research in
space science and ended up as the director of the Center for Meteorite
Studies here. So again a space scientist but also an academic. Um so so it
was a great path for me but a very traditional academic path up to that
point. And that is the opportunity for me came actually when Michael Crow
first came to us, you and I was a faculty member here. One of the very
first senior federal officials he brought to campus was the Nasa
administrator who at that time was Sean O'keefe. So I got to interact with
the head of Nasa during that visit. And long story short partly as a
result of that, I was asked to serve on a Presidential commission on the
future of Nasa in the future of space exploration. While I was still a
professor here and that experience was incredible. I was working with lots
of different people from different sectors, public private government um
nonprofit and got to realize that my fairly traditional academic path um
maybe it wasn't serving me as well as it could. I needed to broaden my
experience if I really wanted to help people in the way that I thought I
could. And so during that experience, several other people on the
Presidential commission said, you know, you should think about going to
work in government for a while. And so when the right position came along
at Nasa even that was very hard to leave my you know my home S. U. Uh to
go work for the government. I did I I ditched my tenure and went and
joined the government, worked for Nasa for six years. You know research
professors or professors who teach and do research and serve the
university. I used to describe it as sort of like being an entrepreneur,
being a small business owner even though you're within the umbrella of
this very supportive institution. We have to raise capital through writing
research grants. We have people working with us who are students and
postdoctoral fellows and lead managers and such. So our team that we have
to manage, we have to produce a product which is new knowledge in the case
of a scientist which we published in scientific journals in order to get
more capital flowing in. So there's very much of an entrepreneurial
mindset there and I think that leadership that is leadership even if it's
on a smaller scale of a of a research group and so you learn how to lead
people how to inspire people to work harder and better and smarter and how
to run an operation and all those things served me really well in Nasa
leadership. So I say I'm a university brat, I literally grew up on the S.
U. Campus. I grew up four miles from here. My mother came back to school
here when I was nine years old. I used to come to classes with her, she
started working on the campus, used to run a S. U. Metro center which is
the forerunner of a sus. And so I literally grew up on the campus, I
started answering phones in the registrar's office when I was 16 years old.
I love being on a university. Being in universities is in my blood. So
even though I left a. S. U. As a faculty member to go get that experience
in the government, I always knew I wanted to come back to academia and I
was just after six years at Nasa after doing a lot of amazing things I
started really missing the students, missing the opportunity of
interactions with students and faculty. And so I um just started again
keeping my eye open for the right opportunity to come along. And and so
when I was asked to apply for the deanship at Rensselaer polytechnic
Institute which is America's oldest technological university it seemed
like a great transition back into the academic world. Yeah I mean it's
exciting going to W. P. I. With your polytechnic it's uh we're just going
to start celebrating the 150th birthday and to be the first woman leader
there is is a is a real honor and it's going to be very exciting. Um I
mean I think you learn leadership from wherever you are. I'm always a
person who believes you can lead from anywhere. I was a faculty member
here at a. S. U. I lead the the team that formulated and created the
School of Earth and Space exploration. But as a faculty member not as
someone who was appointed a leader but just as someone who was asked to
step into a role. And so I think you can get that experience from almost
anywhere. Um And to me it's all about learning how to interact with people
, how to get the best out of people, how to listen to their ideas, marry
their aspirations and the institutions aspirations with the broader world
and what it needs and seeing where those things intersect and carrying it
forward. So that's just something I've learned over the years of all the
various kinds of leadership opportunities I've been given and that's what
I'll try to do with WP. So the great thing about space science is there's
a lot of different ways to get into the field. You can actually do it with
almost any kind of scientific undergraduate degree whether it be sort of
physics and astronomy, geology, chemistry or even biology increasingly as
we think about life in the universe. You can be a biologist and be a space
scientist. So there's in addition obviously to engineering, there's a lot
of jobs for engineers. So there's many different paths and there's many
different places that you can work as someone who's a space scientist. you
can work at a university, you can work for Nasa, you can work for
aerospace companies, you can work for museums. All of these different
places have people working in the sciences related to space. So, so
there's a lot of different options and if people are interested in the in
the career path, there's a lot of different ways in which is a good thing.