By: Laila Schwin, Alisha Bains, and Brittney Corrado
February 23, 2021
Mae Jemison was born October 17, 1956, in Decatur, Alabama. She is a physician and the first African-American woman to become an astronaut. She was also the first African-American woman to go to space.
When Jemison was three-years-old, her family moved to Chicago, Illinois, for better educational opportunities. While there, she was introduced to different sciences by her uncle, which led to her lifelong interests in all fields of scientific study but primarily anthropology, archaeology, evolution, and astronomy.
While in high school, she decided that she was going to get her degree in biomedical engineering. After graduating, she went on to Stanford University, where she ended up getting her dual degrees in chemical engineering and African-American studies.
In 1977, shortly after her graduation from Stanford, Jemison entered medical school at Cornell University. She focused primarily on international medicine and spent time in both Thailand and Kenya, volunteering and studying medicine. She graduated from medical school in 1981, and shortly after a short tenure with a Los Angeles medical group, she became a medical officer with the Peace Corps in West Africa. While there, she worked on research projects, one of which was for the development of a vaccine for Hepatitis B.
Jemison joined NASA’s astronaut corps in 1986 as one of 15 people selected from over 2,000 applicants. Jemison completed her training as a mission specialist at NASA in 1988 and went on to process shuttles for launches and verify shuttle software at the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida. She then assisted in the first successful United States/Japan joint space mission in September of 1992, which was the STS-47 mission she had been selected for, during which she orbited the Earth in 1992 for nearly eight days. She served as a mission specialist aboard the Space Shuttle Endeavour and became the first African-American woman to travel in space.
Mae Jemison left NASA because she wanted to pursue her other interests in teaching, mentoring, health care, science, and technology. Even though she only went on that single mission aboard the Endeavour, she still made history.
{Editor’s Note: Information for this article was retrieved from Britannica.com and Biography.com.}
THE RETURN OF THE EYE 