Even as a young girl growing up on the South Side of Chicago, Mae Jemison dreamed of space travel. She was so determined that even in kindergarten she rejected any suggestion that she had set her sights too high.

"My teacher asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, and I told her a scientist" , said Jemison. The teacher replied, 'Don't you mean a nurse?'

"Now there is nothing wrong with being a nurse", said Jemison, "but that's not what I wanted to be." Her father, who was a maintenance supervisor, and her mother, an elementary school math and English teacher encouraged Jemison to pursue her dream.

In 1973, at 16, she received a scholarship to Stanford University where she went on to earn bachelor's degrees in chemical engineering and African and Afro-American Studies. She next earned her MD from Cornell University.

While in medical school, she spent a summer working in a refugee camp in Thailand. She served as the Peace Corps medical officer in Sierra Leone and Liberia from 1983-85.

While managing the health care of peace corps volunteers and US embassy personnel, she developed and assisted in research projects on hepatitis, rabies and schistosomiasis (a disabling disease, carried by tropical worms, that affects more than 200 million people in areas of Africa, Asia and Latin America).

After returning to the US, Dr. Jemison opened a private practice and began taking graduate courses in engineering at UCLA. She applied to NASA in 1987, and was accepted for astronaut training.

After serving 4 years on the shuttle ground crew, in 1992 her childhood dream of space travel finally came true. As a science-mission specialist aboard Space-lab-J, Dr. Jemison performed experiments to determine how living organisms reacted to zero-gravity and assisted with research on human bone cells.

"One of the first sights I saw when I first went into orbit was the city of Chicago...I went to the window, looked down, and, literally, we passed right over it." After the mission, Chicago organized a city-wide tribute to its hometown heroine.

She left NASA in 1993, to pursue her interests in education and health care and to help give disadvantaged children more opportunities to prepare for careers in science and technology.