Dr. Jan Davis of AU - Graduate

This year's Theme is "Clean Water Solutions" and the students need to solve the ever present problem of keeping our water clean for the cities of the future.

Biography:

Dr. Nancy Jan Davis (1953- ) is a former American astronaut who logged more than 673 hours and 11 million miles in space and orbited the earth 445 times on three Space Shuttle flights in the 1990s. She also held many leadership positions with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) before retiring from the agency in 2005. She continues to work with a NASA contractor at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Madison County.

Davis was born Nancy Jan Smotherman on November 1, 1953, in Cocoa Beach, Florida. Her family moved to Huntsville, Madison County, which she considers home, when she was in elementary school. Later, she took her stepfather's last name. After graduating from Huntsville High School in 1971, Davis earned a bachelor of science degree in applied biology in 1975 from the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta. Two years later, she earned a second bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering from Auburn University in Auburn, Lee County. Davis then went to work for Texaco in Bellaire, Texas, as a petroleum engineer in tertiary, or enhanced, oil recovery methods and contributed to the use of steam flooding, a procedure used to increase the oil's mobility, making it easier to extract from underground deposits for several years.

Joining NASA in 1979 as an aerospace engineer at the Marshall Space Flight Center, Davis completed her postgraduate work at the University of Alabama in Huntsville with a master's degree in mechanical engineering in 1983 and a Ph.D. in mechanical engineering in 1985. In 1986, she became the team leader of Marshall's Structural Analysis Division, which managed the structural analysis and assembly of the Hubble Space Telescope, launched into low Earth orbit in 1990, and the first Hubble maintenance mission launched on December 2, 1993. Her team also managed the preparation of the Advanced X-Ray Astrophysics Facility (renamed the Chandra X-Ray Observatory in 1998), a space observatory launched on July 23, 1999, to detect X-rays from astronomical objects in space. In 1987, Davis became the lead engineer for the redesign of the O-rings that sealed the two solid rocket boosters to the external tank of the remaining Space Shuttles, following the Space Shuttle Challenger (OV-099) explosion on January 28, 1986.

Davis qualified as an astronaut in June 1987 and served in the Astronaut Office Mission Development Branch at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, providing technical support for Space Shuttle payloads and then serving as a capsule communicator in Mission Control for seven Shuttle missions. Her first flight into space was during Space Transportation System mission 47, the fiftieth Space Shuttle mission, aboard the Shuttle Endeavour (OV-105), launched on September 12, 1992. The eight-day mission, with Alabamian Mae Jemison, was a cooperative venture between the United States and Japan. Davis directed the operation of Spacelab, a reusable component-based laboratory housed in the shuttle's cargo bay, and oversaw the performance of 43 life science and materials processing experiments conducted in it. The payload commander was Mark C. Lee, whom Davis had secretly married prior to the mission. The Endeavour landed at Kennedy Space Center, Florida, on September 20, 1992, after completing 126 orbits. Davis then became the Astronaut Office representative for the remote manipulator system, the electromechanical arm of the shuttle's payload deployment and retrieval system, and oversaw the manipulator's operations, training, and payloads.

Her Keynote Speech on Competition Day is titled, “Our Challenge: Living on the Moon”.

Address:Auburn University - CASIC Building, 559 Devall Drive, Auburn, Alabama, United States, 36849