WPI President Laurie Leshin departing for directorship with NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory

WORCESTER — Laurie Leshin, president of Worcester Polytechnic Institute, has been named director of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a California-based space-exploration organization affiliated with NASA.

Leshin, a geochemist and space scientist, will leave WPI at the end of the academic year. She was the school's 16th president, hired in 2014, the first woman to lead WPI.

"We know that this comes at a time when strong and consistent leadership is more important than ever," WPI said in an announcement of Leshin's departure. "An interim president will be voted upon soon by the board."

The Jet Propulsion Laboratory is a research and development lab run by the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). The program is federally funded through NASA.

Leshin holds master's and doctoral degrees from Caltech.

She is a former official at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. She will be the Jet Propulsion Laboratory's first first female director.

“Laurie Leshin stood out in an exhaustive international search because of her profound commitment to people, her strategic approach to scientific and technological opportunities, her deep appreciation of NASA’s leadership in space exploration and Earth science, her mastery of complex organizations, and her ability to inspire the next generation of scientists and engineers,” Caltech President Thomas F. Rosenbaum said.

Before taking over the top job at WPI, Leshin was the dean of the School of Science at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York.

Archives: WPI's new president a NASA veteran

Meantime, space exploration was Leshin's focus in a speech Thursday night during the annual meeting of the Worcester Regional Research Bureau.

Goddard, Bezos and Musk

Leshin, appearing via Zoom, did not mention her career change during the presentation titled, "From Goddard to Bezos and Musk: Our Future in Space."

Leshin discussed Robert Goddard, an aerospace engineer and physics professor who was born in Worcester and attended WPI. He dreamed of sending a rocket out of Earth's atmosphere and exploring beyond the planet 60 years before.

"He was here in Worcester when he climbed a tree and had that dream, and then became a student at WPI," Leshin said. "And he was more than a sort of nerdy pre-rocket scientist, but he actually was very engaged and wrote did things like wrote songs about WPI was a great student and a great visionary and blew some things up in a lot of his experiments, had a lot more failure than success early on, and we've got some patched roots to prove it here."

Leshin pointed to the recent accomplishments of companies such as SpaceX, founded by Tesla Motors CEO and entrepreneur Elon Musk, or the trips to the edge of space made by billionaires Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson.

"The commercial space industry of taking more people to space than has ever been possible before, watch the next few years is just going to go crazy. It's going to be massively huge, very exciting," Leshin said. "But the commercial space sector is doing more than sending tours to space ... and that's really important, by the way, but they're doing other fascinating things."

This article originally appeared on Telegram & Gazette: President Laurie Leshin to leave WPI for NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory at CalTech