Dr. Mae Jemison, M.D. is at the forefront of integrating the physical and social sciences with art and culture to solve problems and foster innovation. Jemison leads 100 Year Starship® (100YSS), a nonprofit global initiative to assure that capabilities for human travel beyond our solar system to another star exist within the next 100 years while transforming life on Earth. 100YSS celebrated its 10th anniversary this year with Nexus Nairobi™ – When SPACE, PURPOSE & CULTURE Collide™—in the cradle of humans. Started through a competitive seed-funding grant from DARPA,100YSS pushes radical leaps in knowledge, technology, and human systems. 

​

Dr. Jemison served six years as a NASA astronaut and was the first woman of color in the world to go into space aboard a joint space shuttle mission with the Japanese space agency. Trained as an engineer, social scientist and dancer, Jemison, a medical doctor, was the Area Peace Corps Medical Officer for Sierra Leone and Liberia. Dr. Jemison founded technology organizations including The Jemison Group, Inc. a technology consulting firm integrating critical socio-cultural issues into the design of engineering and science projects. As an environmental studies professor at Dartmouth College, Dr. Jemison focused on designing sustainability into technologies for both the industrialized and developing worlds.

In 1994, Dr. Jemison founded the international science camp The Earth We Share™ (TEWS), which designs and implements STEM education experiences impacting thousands of students and hundreds of teachers worldwide and is a program of the non-profit Dorothy Jemison Foundation for Excellence (DJF). LOOK UP One Skyä, led by Jemison, developed the “Skyfie” ™ App that connects people, on a single day worldwide, to weave a global tapestry of what we individually see, feel, think, love, fear, offer, need and hope as we look up at the sky.

A member of the National Academy of Medicine, Dr. Jemison is the Chair of the NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts External Council and is on the board of directors of Kimberly-Clark and the National Board of Professional Teaching Standards. Dr. Jemison has led the Texas State Product Development and Small Business Incubator Boards among other national, state and city projects for business incubators and small business investment, infrastructure, disaster response and development of advanced industries and has served on multiple Fortune 500 company boards.
 

​

​