By Leda Zimmerman

At age 9, Ezinne Uzo-Okoro SM ’20, PhD ’22 was preoccupied with down-to-earth problems, such as devising an alternative to her father’s messy, paper Filofax organizer, and fixing the unreliable electric service plaguing her home of Owerri, Nigeria. Could she have imagined a path-breaking, 17-year career at NASA, followed by a position as the nation’s space policy expert?

“Absolutely not,” says Uzo-Okoro. “I knew nothing about space — I wanted to be an inventor.”