Dr. Ellen Ochoa, a veteran astronaut, was the 11th director of the Johnson Space Center (JSC). She was JSC’s first Hispanic/Latinx director and its second female director. Her previous management roles include deputy center director and director of flight crew operations. In 2018, she left NASA to join the National Science Board, where she has served as its chair since 2020.
Dr. Ochoa joined NASA in 1988 as a research engineer at Ames Research Center and moved to Johnson Space Center in 1990 when she was selected as an astronaut. She became the first Hispanic woman to go to space when she served on the nine-day STS-56 mission aboard the space shuttle Discovery in 1993. She has flown in space four times, including STS-66, STS-96, and STS-110, logging nearly 1,000 hours in orbit.
Dr. Ochoa was born in Los Angeles, California on May 10, 1958. As a child, Dr. Ochoa loved to read and her favorite subject in school was math. She excelled in school and won her county’s spelling bee at the age of 13. She graduated from high school in 1975 and was her class valedictorian. Stanford University offered her a full scholarship because of her high grades, but she turned it down because she wanted to stay close to her family and attended San Diego State University instead. Dr. Ochoa earned a bachelor’s degree in physics from San Diego State University. She wanted to study engineering, but since there were not many female engineers, professors encouraged her to study physics instead. Once again, she excelled in school, and she was the valedictorian of her college class when she graduated in 1980. She decided to pursue a master’s degree and doctorate in electrical engineering from Stanford University. As a research engineer at Sandia National Laboratories and NASA Ames Research Center, Dr. Ochoa investigated optical systems for performing information processing. She is a co-inventor on three patents and author of several technical papers.
Dr. Ochoa has been recognized with NASA’s highest award, the Distinguished Service Medal, and the Presidential Distinguished Rank Award for senior executives in the federal government. She has received many other awards and is especially honored to have six schools named for her. She is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA), serves on several boards, and chairs the Nomination Evaluation Committee for the National Medal of Technology and Innovation.
