Catherine Coleman

Catherine Grace Coleman, known as Cady (born 1960), is an American chemist and engineer who served as a United States Air Force officer, retiring as a colonel in 2009, and as a NASA astronaut. She took a bachelor degree in chemistry at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1983 and a doctorate in polymer science and engineering at the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 1991, and from 1988 she worked as a research chemist at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. NASA selected her in 1992, and she flew on two Space Shuttle missions, USML-2 in 1995 and STS-93 in 1999, when she helped deploy the Chandra X-ray Observatory. She also lived underwater as an aquanaut on the NEEMO 7 mission and spent 159 days in space as a member of Expedition 27 on the International Space Station, which she left in 2011.