Mae Jemison
Doctor, engineer and dancer who became the first Black woman to fly in space
Mae Jemison grew up on the south side of Chicago, the daughter of a maintenance supervisor and a teacher. At kindergarten she told her teacher she wanted to be a scientist and was asked whether she meant a nurse. She watched the Apollo missions and noticed there was nobody on the screen who looked like her. She also loved dance and trained seriously for years.
She went to Stanford at sixteen, studied chemical engineering and African studies, and found some professors treated her questions with a coldness she never forgot. She qualified as a doctor at Cornell in 1981, worked in a refugee camp in Thailand and a clinic in Cuba while still a student, and spent two and a half years as medical officer for the Peace Corps in Sierra Leone and Liberia, running healthcare for volunteers and helping with vaccine research.
She applied to NASA in 1985, applied again after the Challenger disaster, and was accepted in 1987. On 12 September 1992 she flew on Endeavour as a science mission specialist, running experiments on bone cells and motion sickness, and took with her a poster from the Alvin Ailey dance company and a small Bundu statue from West Africa.
She left NASA six months later, having decided she could do more elsewhere. She founded a technology company, taught at Dartmouth, appeared in an episode of Star Trek, and leads the 100 Year Starship project on what it would take for people to travel beyond the solar system.