January

Our first Scientist of the Month for 2018 is the first American woman in space and the third overall woman in space: Sally Ride!

Sally Ride clocked 343 hours in space during her tenure with NASA, with two space flights under her belt. She had been training for about 7 months for her third mission when the Challenger disaster happened.

After leaving NASA in 1987, Sally joined the faculty at the University of California in San Diego as a physics professor.

She was incredibly active in the science community until her death in 2012. In 2017, she was immortalized as a LEGO, in the Women of Science set.