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Huntsville, Ala. – Space Camp Hall of Fame inductee Serena Auñón-Chancellor has more than one connection to Huntsville, where she attended Space Academy Level II in 1992. Her father, Dr. Jorge Auñón, was the dean of engineering at the University of Alabama in Huntsville until he retired in 2005.
Serena didn’t grow up in Huntsville, however. She was born in Indianopolis, Ind., to her Cuban-immigrant father and her mother, Margaret Auñón, who writes murder mysteries under the pen name Maggie Sefton. She graduated from Poudre High School in Fort Collins, Colo., in 1993.
Serena’s father was just 18 and alone when he arrived in the U.S., and he set an example of hard work and perseverance.
“When he first came here, he worked at any odd job to make money — as a bartender, in grocery stores, and then he eventually went to George Washington University and became a professor of electrical engineering," Serena told NBC Latino in a 2013 interview.
While Serena followed her in her father’s footsteps and pursued a Bachelor of Science degree in Electrical Engineering from George Washington, she changed course to pursue a passion for medicine. She has a Master of Public Health degree from the University of Texas Medical Branch and her doctorate of medicine from the University of Texas’s Health Science Center at Houston
In August 2006, Serena was hired at NASA as a flight surgeon and spent more than nine months in Russia supporting medical operations for International Space Station crew members in Star City, including water survival training in Ukraine. She served as the Deputy Crew Surgeon for STS-127. She also held the role of Deputy Lead for Orion - Medical Operations. In July 2009, she was selected from more than 3,500 candidates as one of 14 members of the 20th NASA astronaut class. She is the second Hispanic woman to become a NASA astronaut.
Serena graduated in November 2011 from Astronaut Candidate Training, becoming the second Hispanic woman to become a NASA astronaut. She spent two months in Antarctica searching for meteorites as part of the ANSMET expedition. Most of that time was spent living on the ice 200 nautical miles from the South Pole. In June 2012, Serena operated the Deep Worker submersible as part of the NEEMO 16 mission. She subsequently served as an Aquanaut aboard the Aquarius underwater laboratory during the NEEMO 20 undersea exploration mission.
In November 2018, Serena will fly to the International Space Station aboard Expedition 58/59.
“Ever since I was a little girl I wanted to be an astronaut, but I didn’t know what path I needed to take to achieve it,” she told NBC Latino. “I always loved the sciences. Engineering was a good tool because it teaches you to think critically and to solve problems. But my instincts led me to study medicine. I earned my degree in 2001 and went on to do two residencies: internal medicine and aerospace medicine.”
Want to learn more about this Space Camp Alumna? Be sure to follow her on Twitter at @AstroSerena