Jessica Meir

Marine biologist by training, comparative physiologist by doctorate, and one half of the first all-woman spacewalk in history. Jessica Meir studied how emperor penguins hold their breath at depth long before she ever put on an EVA suit — and the transition from Antarctic fieldwork to orbital research makes more sense than it sounds.

Before NASA

Meir was born in Caribou, Maine, to a Swedish mother and an Israeli father. She earned a bachelor’s degree in biology from Brown University in 1999, a master’s degree in space studies from the International Space University in Strasbourg, France, and a doctorate in marine biology from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego.

Her doctoral and postdoctoral research focused on the physiology of animals that survive in extreme environments — specifically, how bar-headed geese fly at the altitude of Mount Everest and how emperor penguins manage their oxygen stores during deep dives beneath the Antarctic ice. She spent field seasons in some of the most remote places on Earth — the kind of isolation that, in hindsight, was decent preparation for living in a sealed module in low Earth orbit.

Before joining NASA she held faculty positions at Harvard Medical School and at the University of British Columbia, teaching and researching comparative physiology.

Spaceflight career

NASA selected Meir in the 2013 astronaut class. Her first spaceflight was Expedition 61/62, launching aboard Soyuz MS-15 in September 2019 for a stay of over two hundred days. That mission is best remembered for a single event: on 18 October 2019, she and Christina Koch conducted the first all-woman spacewalk, replacing a failed battery charge-discharge unit on the Station’s truss. The moment came almost forty years after the EVA suit was first sized for women.

During that expedition Meir participated in a wide range of experiments, including studies on plant growth, biological crystal growth, and combustion in microgravity. She also conducted extensive Earth observation photography.

This expedition

Meir returned for Expedition 74, her second long-duration stay. She serves as flight engineer and brings her scientific training to bear on the biology experiments running in the US and European laboratories. Her background in extreme-environment physiology makes her a natural lead for the human-factors research that examines how crew members adapt — or struggle to adapt — over months in microgravity.

The person

She is described by colleagues as enthusiastic, deeply curious, and the kind of crew member who asks questions about other people’s experiments during dinner. Her route from penguin biology to spaceflight is one of the more unusual career arcs in the astronaut corps, and she speaks about it with evident delight. Off duty she exercises, reads, and photographs Earth from the Cupola.