Jessica Meir

Her father was born in Baghdad, Iraq in 1925.

His family left in 1931 because of antisemitism, moving to British Mandatory Palestine.

Studying medicine at the American University of Beirut when the 1948 Arab–Israeli War broke out he returned to Israel and drove an ambulance.

After the war he completed his medical studies at the University of Geneva.

Working as a physician in Sweden he met Ulla-Britt Karlsson, a nurse from Västerås who'd grown up as a Christian.

The couple moved to the US so that Josef could take up a medical residency at Johns Hopkins Hospital.

While there he was offered a job in Caribou where Meir was born.

Her mother did not convert to Judaism but Meir identifies as culturally Jewish, attended synagogue while growing up and had a bat mitzvah.

She was inspired to venture into space after watching the Space Shuttle missions on television.

Meir knew no one who worked for NASA or for the space program.

She attributes her abiding dream of personally participating in space exploration to the love of nature she learned from her mother, and from her father's predilection for wandering and adventure.

"And it might have had something to do with the fact that the stars shone so brightly in rural Maine", Meir added.

At the age of 13, Meir attended a youth space camp at Purdue University.

During her undergraduate biology studies at Brown University, she also spent a semester studying at Stockholm University in Sweden during her undergraduate years, and ran a student experiment on a NASA reduced gravity aircraft "vomit comet" in her senior year.

Jessica Ulrika Meir (IPA: ; ; born July 1, 1977) is an American NASA astronaut, marine biologist, and physiologist.

She was previously an assistant professor of anesthesia at Harvard Medical School, Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, following postdoctoral research in comparative physiology at the University of British Columbia.

She has studied the diving physiology and behavior of emperor penguins in Antarctica, and the physiology of bar-headed geese, which are able to migrate over the Himalayas.

Meir graduated from Brown in 1999 with a Bachelor of Science degree in biology, magna cum laude.

In 2000, Meir graduated with a Master of Space Studies from the International Space University in Strasbourg, France.

After getting her master's degree, Meir worked from 2000 to 2003 for Lockheed Martin Space Operations as an experiment support scientist for the Human Research Facility at the NASA Johnson Space Center (JSC) in Houston, Texas.

Meir coordinated and supported human space life science experiments that were performed by astronauts on Space Shuttle and International Space Station (ISS) missions.

These experiments included physiological studies (bone loss, muscle control/atrophy, lung function, etc.) to determine if any bodily processes were altered in the spaceflight environment.

Meir guided these experiments through the necessary review cycles, developed procedures that the astronauts would use on-orbit, trained crew members, and provided ground support in the Mission Control Center while the astronauts were performing the experiments on the shuttle or ISS.

In September 2002, Meir served as an aquanaut on the NASA Extreme Environment Mission Operations 4 (NEEMO 4) crew.

In September 2002, Meir served as an aquanaut on the joint NASA-NOAA NEEMO 4 expedition (NASA Extreme Environment Mission Operations), an exploration research mission held in Aquarius, an undersea research laboratory four miles off shore from Key Largo.

Meir and her crewmates spent five days saturation diving from the Aquarius habitat as a space analogue for working and training under extreme environmental conditions.

The mission was delayed due to Hurricane Isadore, forcing National Undersea Research Center managers to shorten it to an underwater duration of five days.

Then, three days into their underwater mission, the crew members were told that Tropical Storm Lili was headed in their direction and to prepare for an early departure from Aquarius.

Fortunately, Lili degenerated to the point where it was no longer a threat, so the crew was able to remain the full five days.

Meir earned a Ph.D. in marine biology in 2009 from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography for research on the diving physiology of emperor penguins and northern elephant seals.

Meir performed field work at Penguin Ranch on McMurdo Sound in Antarctica to study the diving abilities of the emperor penguin while scuba diving alongside them under the ice.

She also studied elephant seals while they were diving in the Pacific Ocean off Northern California.

Meir did post-doctoral research at the University of British Columbia, raising bar-headed geese so their tolerance of high altitude and low oxygen levels during flight over the Himalayas could be studied in a controlled environment.

For the 2012 academic year she continued her research as an assistant professor of anesthesia at the Harvard Medical School/Massachusetts General Hospital and then took a leave of absence to enter the astronaut corps.

In 2013, she was selected by NASA to Astronaut Group 21.

In 2016, Meir participated in ESA CAVES, a training course in which international astronauts train in a space-analogue cave environment.

Meir launched on September 25, 2019, to the ISS onboard Soyuz MS-15, where she served as a flight Engineer during Expedition 61 and 62.

On October 18, 2019, Meir and Christina Koch were the first women to participate in an all-female spacewalk.

Meir was included in Time magazine's 100 Most Influential People of 2020.

Meir was born in Caribou, Maine, to Josef H Meir, an Israeli of Iraqi-Jewish descent and Ulla-Britt Meir from Sweden.