NASA flight engineer Kathleen “Kate” Rubins began her fourth spacewalk career Friday, in an effort to prepare the International Space Station (ISS) for solar panel upgrades.
Rubins, 42, was born in Farmington, Connecticut in 1978, but grew up in Napa, the heart of California’s Wine Country.
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After graduating from Vintage High School in 1996, Rubins earned a Bachelor of Science in molecular biology from the University of California, San Diego just three years later.
In 2005 Rubins received a PhD in cancer biology from Stanford University Medical School Biochemistry Department and Microbiology and Immunology Department.
There, she and colleagues from the US Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention developed the first model of smallpox infection in addition to a complete map of the smallpox virus transcriptome.
She also studied virus-host interactions using both in vitro and animal model systems.
After her time and Stanford, Rubins started as a Fellow / Principal Investigator at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
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At MIT, Rubin led a lab of 14 researchers studying viral diseases affecting Central and West Africa and traveled to the Democratic Republic of the Congo to conduct further research and supervise study sites.
Her lab focused on poxviruses, host-pathogen interaction, and viral mechanisms regulating transcription, translation, and decay of host cell mRNA.
Rubin also worked on collaborative projects with the military to develop therapies for Ebola and Lassa viruses.
In the summer of 2009, she was selected by NASA as one of nine elected members of the 20th NASA astronaut class.
She received extensive training and instruction in ISS systems, spacewalks, robotics, physiological training, T 38 flight training, and survival training in water and wilderness.
During her first space flight on Expedition 48/49 in July 2016, Rubins became the first person to sequence DNA in space and lead the expeditions’ crews or participate in more than 275 different experiments.
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Rubins also grew heart cells, or cardiomyocytes, in cell culture and conducted quantitative, real-time PCR and microbiome experiments in orbit.
The experienced astronaut serves on board the ISS on a six-month mission as a flight engineer for the crew of Expedition 63/64.