Bondar, Roberta

Roberta Bondar, in full Roberta Lynn Bondar, (born December 4, 1945, Sault Sainte Marie, Ontario, Canada), Canadian neurologist, researcher, and astronaut, the first Canadian woman and the first neurologist to travel into space.

Bondar earned a B.Sc. in zoology and agriculture from the University of Guelph (1968), an M.Sc. in experimental pathology from the University of Western Ontario (1971), and a Ph.D. in neurobiology from the University of Toronto (1974) before receiving an M.D. from McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, in 1977. She received further postgraduate medical training in neurology and neuro-ophthalmology before she was admitted as a fellow in neurology to the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada in 1981. In 1983 Bondar was chosen as one of the six original Canadian astronauts, and she began her astronaut training as a member of the Canadian Space Agency (CSA) in 1984.

Roberta Bondar and Stephen S. Oswald in the International Microgravity Laboratory's science module

In early 1990 Bondar was selected to be a payload specialist for the first International Microgravity Laboratory Mission (IML-1), a crewed Spacelab module aimed at investigating the effects of weightlessness on living organisms and materials processing. She flew into space as a payload specialist on the Discovery space shuttle during the STS-42 mission, launching into space on January 22, 1992, and returning to Earth on January 30. During the eight-day mission, she and her six fellow astronauts conducted several life science and materials science experiments on Spacelab, focusing on the adaptability of the human nervous system to low gravity and analyzing the effects of microgravity on other living organisms, such as shrimp eggs, fruit fly eggs, and bacteria.

Bondar left the CSA in September 1992 to devote more time to her research interests. Her pioneering status as Canada’s first woman astronaut and the first neurologist in space and her accomplishments in space medicine brought her numerous awards and led to her appointment as an Officer of the Order of Canada, Canada’s highest civilian honour. In 2003 Bondar was appointed chancellor of Trent University in Peterborough, Ontario, and she held the post until 2009. An accomplished photographer, she published several books containing her work, including Touching the Earth (1994), about her spaceflight, and The Arid Edge of Earth (2006), about deserts.