I believe that there will be women astronauts sometime just as there are women airplane pilots.

I had never used the prefix 'Dr.' with my name, but when I started with NASA, I had to. Otherwise, I could not get past the secretaries.

I started out, as most astronomers do, with a university job. But in my generation, women weren't very welcome at universities, and so I found a job in the government. And the government was appreciably more welcoming.

Just as the lunar landings inspired many young people to consider careers in space and related fields, the solution of the challenging instrumentation problems presented in space science can inspire young people to push beyond the current state of the art.

My main interest is the problem of the singularity. If we can't understand what happened at the singularity we came out of, then we don't seem to have any understanding of the laws of particle physics. I'd be very happy just to understand the last singularity and leave the other ones to future generations.

I remember thinking that people were crazy for reading the same book more than once, but I now have a new-found appreciation for the re-discovery of literature. The lessons we learned from books in the school curriculum are reinvented and updated when we read as adults.

My parents moved around Stockton and Lodi. I had a lot of anxiety about jumping into another classroom. They were always putting me in special ed. But I was smart; I wasn't like these kids in the special-ed classes. But it would make me feel a little bit stupid.

My father ran an insurance company, but he passed away when I was 8. My mother was an economist working for the government of Liberia. But both my grandmothers were entrepreneurs in rural West Africa.