Don's Bio

Don started his professional career as a Senior Member of the Technical Staff at the Bell Laboratory’s Engineering Research Center in Princeton, NJ working on materials issues in semiconductor devices.  From there he joined Lockheed Sciences and Engineering in Houston, TX as an engineer working on the Space Shuttle program. 

Selected as a mission specialist astronaut in NASA’s 13th group of astronauts in 1990, he is a veteran of four Space Shuttle missions, three aboard Columbia and one aboard Discovery.  He has spent 44 days in space completing nearly 700 orbits of the Earth and traveling 17.6 million miles in the process. Today he is the director of the Hackerman Academy of Mathematics and Science at Towson University working to encourage and inspire young students to follow in his footsteps to become our next generation of scientists, engineers, astronauts, and explorers.

Official NASA Biography: http://www.jsc.nasa.gov/Bios/htmlbios/thomas-d.html