Mae Jemison

Despite NASA’s rigid protocol, Jemison would begin each shift with a salute that only a Trekkie could appreciate. “Hailing frequencies open,” she could be heard repeating throughout the eight-day mission.

Now the president of her own consulting firm, its mission to find high-tech salves for the afflictions of developing nations, Dr. Mae Carol Jemison is the Lt. Uhura of her generation. As she prepared to return to Stanford to deliver the university’s 105th commencement address June 16, it was with the realization that her own achievements have helped redefine the image of modern-day scientists ­ in the real world, not just in space-age fiction.

n engineer, physician, educator and jazz dancer, Jemison is keenly aware of the obstacles that women and minorities must overcome to succeed in fields that have long been exclusionary. At 39, she is angrier than she once was about how inherently unfair that is, about how impossibly superb members of those excluded groups are expected to be in order to prove that merit, not entitlement, won them an opportunity.

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