Hello listeners,

Don't you just love it when a former student comes back and visits? Teachers love this. This week, we are looking forward to chatting with Tanya Bott, one of Karen's students when she taught elementary students. We will chat about Tanya's job with NASA and girls in Technology. Tanya was such a delight. She is a wonderful role model for young women who want to pursue a career in science - any kind of science. You never know where your studies might lead you.

Her Instagram connection is: @tanyabpaine

We were so excited to chat with Tanya about science and what it is like to work at NASA. Here are some of the things she shared with us:

I’m from the central Texas area (Temple, to be exact). I spent my entire childhood there and after graduating high school moved to College Station to attend Texas A&M. I majored in Biomedical Sciences, which is essentially are a set of sciences applying portions of natural science or formal science (or both) to develop knowledge, interventions, or technology that are of use in healthcare or public health efforts.
I loved studying the sciences, and I think a lot of that carried over from my natural interest in science ever since I was a young girl. I chose my major because when I first got to college, my goal was to go into medicine. Fast forward a couple years, I’m in my late junior year of college and I started to explore other fields and jobs that weren’t necessarily medicine, but where I could still use my degree and immerse myself in the scientific community. A few months post-college graduation, I stumbled upon a job opening within the Human Health and Performance Directorate at NASA supporting the Health and Medical Technical Authority, applied, and the rest is history.
Despite the global pandemic impacting so many fields and industries, it’s been all gas and no brakes for human spaceflight. I’d love to share a little bit about my experience in the aerospace industry, not only as a woman but as someone who entered this world with a somewhat non-traditional background that one would expect from your typical NASA/Boeing/SpaceX/etc employee.
As I mentioned, I was a BIMS major at Texas A&M so when I initially stumbled upon this job, I didn’t think I had a chance to work at NASA. Now, having been here for around 2 ½ years, I can honestly say that the work my team does is perhaps some of the most impactful at NASA, and it’s a huge honor.
HH&P Vision and Mission: The Human Health and Performance Directorate (HH&P) at NASA is an organization primarily focused on humans living, working, and thriving in space, on the moon, and eventually Mars. Our mission is to lead the global spaceflight community in protecting astronaut health and ensuring human mission performance.
We cover a number of areas of expertise, such as radiation, lighting, toxicology, microbiology, acoustics, astronaut strength/conditioning/rehab, anthropometry and biomechanics, and much more.

What are the current projects you’re working on?

I want to encourage people who might not feel a pull towards engineering to not count yourself out! NASA, and aerospace in general, needs people with a variety of skills and backgrounds. In fact I’d even expand that to say that the broader science and technology community needs representation from women. I think about people like Marie Curie who contributed so much to finding the early treatments for cancer, Katherine Johnson who played a pivotal role in getting man to the moon, Rosalind Franklin who was the first to discover the double helix structure of DNA, just to name a few and I’m blown away by the magnitude of impact they made on the world.

We hope you enjoy this discussion. Thank you for listening and for spreading the word about today's chat.

Onward!

Sandy and Karen

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