Kathryn C. Thornton earned her Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Virginia. She is currently a professor at the School of Engineering and Applied Science, Division of Technology, Culture and Communications and also the director of the Center for Science, Mathematics, and Engineering Education at the University of Virginia. She has served as an astronaut at the Johnson Space Center and as a physicist in the US Army Foreign Science and Technology Center in Virginia. She is a veteran of four space flights and has logged over 975 hours in space, including 21 hours of extravehicular activity (EVA) and holds the women’s record for number and duration of EVA. She was a mission specialist aboard the Space Shuttle Endeavor on the Hubble Space Telescope servicing and repair mission. She has served as the payload commander of the second United States Microgravity Laboratory mission, which focused on materials science, biotechnology, combustion science, the physics of fluids, and other scientific experiments, housed in the pressurized spacelab module.