Marissa E. Yingling

Dr. Yingling is an Associate Professor of Social Work at the University of Louisville. For more than twenty years her work has focused on autism services, and she has authored or co-authored more than twenty-five peer-reviewed articles. Her primary goal has been to maximize access to health services for children with autism by conducting research that has concrete and actionable practice and policy implications. She is co-editor of the forthcoming Routledge Handbook of Research Methods and Methodologies in Social and Behavioral Sciences. Along with co-author Charlton W. Yingling, she is writing the book Statusquotastrophe, which is in progress and under contract.

She is leveraging her expertise to investigate the social and environmental implications of human ambitions in space. Since 2021, she has been developing a book project on the rise of space commercialism; the concept of starwashing is one component. In 2023, she published a peer-reviewed article in the International Journal of Social Welfare that outlined the need for the profession of social work to expand its definition of environment to include space. Along with co-investigator Charlton W. Yingling, she is completing a mixed method study on public perceptions of ongoing developments in space, such as space tourism, NASA's Artemis program, and regulations on the Moon, among other topics. In May 2026 they presented early findings from this work at the In-hospitable Space Conference at Carnegie Mellon, sponsored by the Society for Social and Conceptual Issues in Astrobiology and the European Astrobiology Institute. To enhance public engagement, they co-wrote a companion essay for the Pittsburgh Review of Books.