Donna Shirley 03/14/2011

Born in Pauls Valley, Oklahoma in 1941. She earned her engineering degree from OU despite the fact she was told women were not engineers. When she began working for NASA in 1966 she was the only female with an engineering degree out of 2,000 engineers. She managed NASA's Mars Exploration Program, becoming the first woman to manage a NASA program, and led the team that flew the Pathfinder and Sojourner to Mars in 1997. She retired from NASA in 1998, served as Assistant Dean of Aerospace Mechanical Engineering at the University of Oklahoma, and became Director of the Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame in Seattle until 2004. She currently serves as President of Managing Creativity. She was inducted in the Oklahoma Women's Hall of Fame in 2003.