Why is mae c. jemison important

She was one of 15 accepted out of around applicants in Jemison was the science mission specialist on the STS Spacelab-J flight, which in spent eight days in space from 12 to 20 September. During the mission, 44 life science and materials processing experiments were carried out by the crew while orbiting Earth times. Through her foundation, Jemison is now leading the US government-funded Year Starship project, which aims to help develop the technology needed to achieve interstellar space flight within a century.

Her foundation also runs a science camp for young people called The Earth We Share. After leaving the astronaut corps in March , Jemison accepted a teaching fellowship at Dartmouth.

She also established the Jemison Group, a company that seeks to research, develop and market advanced technologies. We strive for accuracy and fairness. If you see something that doesn't look right, contact us! Subscribe to the Biography newsletter to receive stories about the people who shaped our world and the stories that shaped their lives.

Madam C. Walker created specialized hair products for African American hair care and was one of the first American women to become a self-made millionaire. In , astronaut and astrophysicist Sally Ride became the first American woman in space aboard the space shuttle Challenger. Addie Mae Collins was a year-old murder victim whose death focused public attention on racial violence in the South. As a mission specialist aboard the space shuttle Challenger in , Guion S. Bluford became the first African American to travel into space.

Mae West started in Vaudeville and on the stage in New York, and later moved to Hollywood to star in films known for their blunt sexuality and steamy settings. George C. Wallace was a four-time governor of Alabama and three-time presidential hopeful. He is best remembered for his s segregationist politics. One of NASA's human 'computers,' Katherine Johnson performed the complex calculations that enabled humans to successfully achieve space flight.

She speaks fluent Russian, Japanese, and Swahili. Jemison has received numerous honors and awards. She received the Essence Award in She inspired the Mae C. I think growing up in the United States, of course, a woman, a black person is discriminated against. You know, there is no way out of that. The issue is, is what do you do with the obstacles that people put in front of you. You can buy into them, or you can give the obstacles back to that person.

It doesn't mean that it's easy, but you can go around and you can create another path sometimes. But if you focus in on only that obstacle, then it's very hard to move forward, because that's where your attention will be drawn. Now that doesn't mean that society is absolved from it's responsibility to remove those obstacles and those obstacle makers. But it does mean that in some sense, you have a little bit more control over it.

When people talk about the space program, they ask me, "Was it the toughest job I ever had; was it the most difficult," and it wasn't. Probably being a Peace Corps doctor was the most difficult job, because I was on call seven days a week, 24 hours a day, days a year, and I was responsible for people's lives and their health. I was the person that was there. And it required a very wide range of skills, and learning how to keep my own health together, as well as paying attention to other folks.

As a Peace Corps Area Medical Officer I learned a lot about developing countries, about health care in those situations; and as an astronaut I learned an awful lot about remote sensing satellite telecommunications and all of these nice things And that really set the tone for a lot of the work that I did later on, which was looking at: how do you use advanced technologies in developing countries.

How do you blend social issues with technology design. I was always aware of space exploration. I followed the Gemini, the Mercury, and the Apollo programs, I had books about them and I always assumed I would go into space. When I went to school I wanted to major in Biomedical Engineering, and back then there was really no course curriculum in Biomedical Engineering. So I was steered toward the Chemical Engineering school. Or how do you look at different kinds of polymers that are used in biological materials or systems?

And so I ended up going into Chemical Engineering because of that. Because I could get a classical engineering degree, and then I could follow it up with more medicine and more biology.

Then it was very interesting, because I got some of the best counseling advice I've ever gotten. One was from an M. Because sometimes M. I was told that also by an electrical engineering professor who happened to have an M.