Engineering a Career in Orbit
Ellen Ochoa was born in Los Angeles in 1958 to a family with Mexican roots, and grew up in La Mesa, California. An accomplished flutist, she weighed a career in music before committing to science. She completed a bachelor's degree in physics, then a master's and, in 1985, a doctorate in electrical engineering at Stanford University.
Ochoa's doctoral and postdoctoral work was in optical information processing — using optics and computing to extract meaning from images. She is a co-inventor on three patents: an optical inspection system, an optical object-recognition method, and a method for removing noise from images. This is foundational machine vision work, the same problem space that industrial inspection and autonomous vehicles occupy today.
Selected by NASA in 1990, Ochoa first flew in April 1993 aboard *Discovery* on STS-56, an atmospheric science mission, becoming the first Hispanic woman in space. Over four shuttle flights she accumulated nearly 1,000 hours in orbit. She served as a mission specialist and flight engineer, operated the shuttle's robotic manipulator arm, and flew missions that delivered hardware and supplies to the International Space Station.
Her career then moved from the flight deck to management. She served as deputy director and, from 2013 to 2018, director of NASA's Johnson Space Center — the first Hispanic person and the second woman to hold that post, responsible for human spaceflight operations and astronaut training.
