UTMB Professor on International Space Station

Dr. Serena Auñón-Chancellor, a NASA astronaut and a UTMB assistant professor in internal medicine, is aboard the International Space Station.

After the Soyuz spacecraft was launched from Kazakhstan, the three –member crew arrived at the ISS June 8, restoring the station’s crew level to six.

The other two astronauts who were on the Soyuz were Alexander Gerst from the European Space Agency and Sergey Prokopyev of the Russian space agency Roscosmos.

The ISS crew will spend about five months conducting about 250 scientific studies in fields such as biology, earth science, human research, physical sciences and technology development.

Auñón-Chancellor was selected as an astronaut in 2009 and is the 61st woman to fly in space.

After medical school at UT Health in Houston, she completed a three-year residency in internal medicine at UTMB and also the UTMB aerospace medicine program. She also completed an additional year as chief resident in the internal medicine at UTMB.

She also completed an aerospace medicine residency at UTMB as well as a master of public health in 2007. She is board certified internal and aerospace medicine.

You can follow Dr. Auñón-Chancellor’s journey on Twitter at https://twitter.com/AstroSerena