Bonnie Dunbar

A veteran of five Space Shuttle missions flown between 1985 and 1998, Dunbar is an American engineer and retired NASA astronaut whose flights included two dockings with the Mir space station. Before her astronaut career, she designed the ceramic tiles and manufacturing processes used in the Space Shuttle thermal protection system during her time as a senior research engineer at Rockwell International's Space Division. She earned a Master of Science degree in ceramics engineering from the University of Washington.

Dunbar joined NASA in 1978 as a flight controller and payload officer, serving as a guidance and navigation controller for Skylab during its de-orbit and re-entry in July 1979. Selected as part of NASA Astronaut Group 9 in 1980, she flew on missions STS-61-A, STS-32, STS-50, STS-71, and STS-89, and also trained in Russia as a cosmonaut.

Following her NASA career, Dunbar became president and chief executive officer of the Museum of Flight in Seattle, where she focused on STEM education for high school students. From 2013 to 2015, she led the University of Houston's STEM Center and served as a faculty member in the Cullen College of Engineering. In 2016, she joined Texas A&M University as the John and Bea Slattery professor of aerospace engineering and served as Director of the Institute for Engineering Education and Innovation there through 2020.