Physician => Astronaut
Mae Carol Jemison is an American engineer, physician and astronaut, the first Black woman to travel to space.
Born in 1956 in Alabama, US. Her mother, unhappy with job opportunities in the South, joined the Great Migration and moved to Chicago, Illinois.
When she was eight years old her mother signed her up for beginner ballet at the Sadie Bruce Dance Academy. This started her life-long love of dance. She continued to take modern dance classes at the Jane Addams Hull House Association Community Center.
Excelling in science during elementary school, Jemison created projects focusing on the evolution of life on planet Earth. She learned about astronomy while visiting the Adler Planetarium in Chicago; viewing stars from the perspective of the Southern Hemisphere and being fascinated looking at what the sky looked like thousands of years ago.
Once Jemison graduated from high school, she left Chicago to attend Stanford University in California. There, during study, she served as the president of the Black Student Union.
Jemison graduated from Stanford with a degree in Chemical Engineering and went to study Medicine at Cornell. She then spent 2 years as a Peace Corps medical officer in Sierra Leone and Liberia from 1983 until 1985.
Upon her return to the US, Jemison changed careers. In 1983, after watching Sally Ride, Jemison decided to apply to the astronaut program at NASA. Then, in 1987, she was admitted to the US NASA astronaut training program. During September 1992, Jemison became the first Black woman to travel to space, where she spent 8 days orbiting the Earth aboard the Space Shuttle Endeavour.
Jemison left NASA in 1993 and founded a technology research company. She later formed a non-profit educational foundation and through the foundation she became the principal of the 100-Year Starship project funded by DARPA. Its goal was to explore a viable and sustainable model for persistent, long-term, private-sector investment into the myriad of disciplines needed to make interstellar space travel practicable and feasible.
Jemison wrote several books for children and appeared on television several times, including in a 1993 episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation.
“Sometimes people want to tell you to act or to be a certain way. Sometimes people want to limit you because of their own imaginations. Strange, but I always knew I’d be here. Looking down and all around me, seeing the Earth, the moon, and the stars, I just felt that I belonged right there, and in fact, any place in the entire universe” from “Mae Jemison: Coming In From Outer Space.”
She holds several honorary doctorates and has been inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame and the International Space Hall of Fame.