I can't think of anything specific growing up that pointed me toward NASA at all. I was interested in the Moon landings just about the same as everyone else of my generation. But I never really thought about being an astronaut or working in space myself.

Other than motherhood, the eight years that I spent at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, I have incredibly fond memories of. It's a beautiful place, with four seasons up in Wisconsin. And really wonderful people.

Some things are only capable of being done in space. Examples of that are looking at our Earth from that far away, and understanding the entire processes of storms and weather patterns, and oceans, and coastlines.

We're looking at Earth science, observing our planet. Also space science, looking at the ozone in the atmosphere around our Earth. Also looking at life science. And on a human level, using ourselves as test subjects.

A valid scientific theory is predictive, verifiable, and replicable. To me, that's beautiful.

We have to be aware that the scientific community throws up tons of different hypotheses and at a certain point we'll find out who was right and who was wrong. But we have to go with the best information right now, which I would claim to be the IPCC reports.

My own ideas on the mechanism of catalytic phenomena were very different from those at one time commonly held, ideas which I no doubt owed to the influence of the illustrious teacher who had guided my first steps in chemistry nearly twenty years before - I refer, of course, to Berthelot.

In 2010, I attended Prince George's Community College in hopes of transferring to The University of Maryland. My major was computer science, and the goal was to one day work as an I.T.