Mae Carol Jemison was born in Decatur, Alabama on October 17, 1956; She is the youngest of three children of Charlie Jemison, a carpenter, and Dorothy Green, a teacher at Ludwig van Beethoven Elementary School in Chicago, Illinois. According to a DNA analysis, the Mae Jemison ancestors are 84% of sub-Saharan origin, 13% of the Far East and 3% of American whites. His family moved to Chicago, Illinois, when Jemison was three years old, to take advantage of better educational opportunities.
She loves science and the arts and started dancing at the age of eleven. After high school at Chicago’s Morgan Park High School, she was accepted in 1973 at Stanford University when she was only sixteen; she graduated in 1977 with a Bachelor of Science in Chemical Engineering and a Bachelor of Arts in African American Studies. In 1981 she graduated as a medical doctor at Weill Medical College from Cornell University.
She has been an intern at the USC Medical Center in Los Angeles as a general practitioner. She joined the Peace Corps from 1983 to 1985, where she traveled to Cuba, Kenya, Thailand, Liberia, and Sierra Leone to practice medicine.
In 1983, she was refused when she first registered with NASA but joined in 1987. Her work at NASA before her orbital flight included supporting activities at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida and shuttle software verification in the integration laboratory. She was in the first class of astronauts selected after the Challenger accident in 1986.
Mae Jemison completed her only space mission from September 12 to September 20, 1992, as Mission Specialist on STS-47 (STS-47 is the second mission of Space Shuttle Endeavor). She took several small art objects from West African countries and a photo of Bessie Coleman, the first African-American woman to obtain her pilot’s license.
STS-47 was a cooperative mission between the United States and Japan. Mae Jemison recorded 190 hours, 30 minutes and 23 seconds in space, which is almost 8 days. She left NASA in March 1993.
In 1993, she founded her own company, the Jemison Research Group, to develop science and technology in everyday life. In 1993, she appeared in an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, where she plays the role of Lieutenant Palmer.
She founded the Dorothy Jemison Foundation for Excellence, named after her mother. One of the projects of the Dorothy Jemison Foundation is The planet we share (TEWS), an international science camp for students.
