Scott Parazynski

Dr. Scott Parazynski has lived and traveled all over the world, spending many of his grade school years in places like Dakar (Senegal), Beirut (Lebanon), Tehran (Iran) and Athens (Greece). A graduate of Stanford University and Stanford Medical School, he went on to train at Harvard and in Denver in preparation for a career in emergency medicine and trauma. A physiologist with expertise in human adaptation to stressful environments, he was selected to NASA's Astronaut Corps in 1992, and has flown 5 Space Shuttle Missions and conducted 7 spacewalks. Mission highlights include leading the first joint US-Russian spacewalk (during STS-86, while docked to the Russian space station Mir), serving as Senator John Glenn's crewmate and "personal physician" (during STS-95), and the EVA assembly of the Canadian-built space station arm (during STS-100).

In October 2009, Dr. Parazynski led the EVA team on STS-120, a highly complex space station assembly flight, during which he performed 4 EVAs. The fourth and final EVA is regarded by many as one of the most challenging and dangerous ever performed: he was positioned by a 90-foot robotic boom farther than crewmembers had ever ventured from the safety of their airlock, and while there had to repair a fully energized solar array wing using so-called "cufflinks" - essentially large "sutures" to stabilize the array. The tremendous coordinated efforts on orbit and on the ground by Mission Control and other engineering experts during a 72 hour period has been likened to the Shuttle-Space Station era's "Apollo 13."

As of 2015, Dr. Parazynski is the President of the board of directors of the Challenger Space Science Education.