Dynamic speaker Kathryn Sullivan is a former astronaut who now heads the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).
Sullivan was the first American woman to walk in space and served on the shuttle mission that deployed the Hubble Space Telescope. In 2014, she was featured on Time magazine’s list of the “100 Most Influential People in the World.”
Sullivan graduated from UC Santa Cruz in 1973 with a bachelor’s degree in Earth sciences. An accomplished oceanographer, she earned a Ph.D. in geology at Dalhousie University in Canada. She was appointed NOAA’s chief scientist in 1993 and later served a decade as president and CEO of the Center of Science and Industry in Columbus, Ohio, and was the inaugural director of the Battelle Center for Mathematics and Science Education Policy at Ohio State University.
