Kathryn Dwyer Sullivan (born October 3, 1951) is an American geologist, oceanographer, and former NASA astronaut and US Navy officer. She was a crew member on three Space Shuttle missions.
A graduate of University of California, Santa Cruz, in the United States, and Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia, Canada—where she earned a Doctor of Philosophy degree in geology in 1978—Sullivan was selected as one of the six women among the 35 astronaut candidate in NASA Astronaut Group 8, the first group to include women. During her training, she became the first woman to be certified to wear a United States Air Force pressure suit, and on July 1, 1979, she set an unofficial sustained American aviation altitude record for women. During her first mission, STS-41-G, Sullivan performed the first extra-vehicular activity (EVA) by an American woman. On her second, STS-31, she helped deploy the Hubble Space Telescope. On the third, STS-45, she served as Payload Commander on the first Spacelab mission dedicated to NASA's Mission to Planet Earth.
Sullivan was Under Secretary of Commerce for Oceans and Atmosphere and Administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) after being confirmed by the US Senate on March 6, 2014. Her tenure ended on January 20, 2017, after which she was designated as the 2017 Charles A. Lindbergh Chair of Aerospace History at the Smithsonian Institution's National Air and Space Museum, and also served as a Senior Fellow at the Potomac Institute for Policy Studies. On June 7, 2020, Sullivan became the first woman to dive into the Challenger Deep in the Mariana Trench, the deepest part of Earth's oceans. In September 2021, President Joe Biden appointed her to the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology.
Early life and education
Kathryn Dwyer Sullivan was born in Paterson, New Jersey, on October 3, 1951, the daughter of Donald Paul Sullivan and his wife Barbara, Kelly. She had a brother, Grant. In 1958 the family moved to the San Fernando Valley in California, where her father worked in the aerospace industry for Marquardt Corporation. She was in the first grade at Havenhurst Elementary School, where Sally Ride was a classmate, but the school closed in 1958 to make way for Van Nuys Airport, and neither woman could recall meeting the other. During her school years she was a girl scout.
Sullivan graduated from William Howard Taft High School in the Woodland Hills district of Los Angeles, California, in 1969. She took both French and German in high school, and resolved to have a career in the foreign service. She chose to enter the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC), on account of its renowned Russian studies program. The university required that humanities students take three science classes and vice versa. She chose to take courses in marine biology, topology and oceanography. She enjoyed these, and altered her course to take in more science subjects. She was an exchange student at the University of Bergen in Norway for the 1971–1972 school year and the two summers around it, and decided to change her major to oceanography. She was awarded a Bachelor of Science degree in Earth Sciences from UCSC in 1973, and a Doctor of Philosophy in geology from Dalhousie University and the Bedford Institute of Oceanography in Nova Scotia, Canada, in 1978, writing her doctoral thesis on The structure and evolution of the Newfoundland Basin under the supervision of Michael John Keen. While at Dalhousie, she participated in several oceanographic expeditions that studied the floors of the Atlantic and Pacific oceans.