Scott Edward Parazynski (born July 28, 1961) is an American physician and former NASA astronaut. A veteran of five Space Shuttle flights and seven spacewalks, Parazynski's latest mission was STS-120 in October 2007 – highlighted by a dramatic, unplanned extra-vehicular activity (EVA) to repair a live solar array. In May 2016, he was inducted into the United States Astronaut Hall of Fame. He retired from NASA in March 2009 to pursue entrepreneurial opportunities in the private sector, and he is currently the CEO of a technology start-up. He is the first person to have both flown in space and summited Mount Everest, the highest point on Earth. He describes his life's experiences in his 2017 memoir The Sky Below.
Personal life Parazynski is of Polish descent, as his great-great-grandparents migrated from Kraków to the US. He considers Palo Alto, California, and Evergreen, Colorado, to be his hometowns. He is married to Meenakshi Wadhwa, a planetary scientist at Arizona State University. He has two children with his first wife, Gail. Scott enjoys mountaineering, rock climbing, flying and scuba diving. A commercial, multi-engine, seaplane and instrument-rated pilot, Parazynski has logged over 2500 flight hours in a variety of aircraft. As a mountaineer, his summits include Cerro Aconcagua (at 22,841 feet (6,962 m) above sea level, the tallest mountain in the world outside Asia) and all 59 of Colorado's peaks over 14,000 feet (4,300 m) in altitude. He first attempted to summit Mount Everest in May 2008, but was forced to turn back before the summit due to a severe back injury. Serving as team physician for the Discovery Channel a year later, at 4:00 am on May 20, 2009, he successfully summited the 29,029 feet (8,848 m) mountain. Other notable expeditions include a scientific dive into the summit caldera lake atop Licancabur Volcano (19,409 feet (5,916 m) on the Bolivian-Chilean border), one of the world's highest lakes, and setting the first bootprints adjacent Masaya Volcano's lava lake in Nicaragua with Sam Cossman in 2016. He also travelled aboard OceanGate's submersible Titan and visited the wreck of the Titanic in the North Atlantic.
Education and early life Parazynski attended junior high school at Dakar Academy in Dakar, Senegal, and Beirut, Lebanon. In March 1969 as an eight-year-old, he travelled to Florida to witness the launch of Apollo 9, an event he argued inspired him to pursue a career in science. He attended high school at the Community School, Tehran, Iran, and the American Community School, Athens, Greece, graduating in 1979. He received a Bachelor of Science degree in biology from Stanford University in 1983, continuing on to graduate with honors from Stanford Medical School in 1989. He served his medical internship at the Brigham and Women's Hospital of Harvard Medical School (1990). He had completed 22 months of a residency program in emergency medicine in Denver, Colorado, when selected for the NASA Astronaut Corps.
Organizations Parazynski is a Fellow of the Aerospace Medical Association and The Explorers Club. Additionally, he is a member of the American Society for Gravitational and Space Biology, the Wilderness Medical Society, the American Alpine Club, the Association of Space Explorers, the Experimental Aircraft Association, and the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association. He is president of the board of directors of the Challenger Center for Space Science Education, and serves on the boards of the Houston Museum of Natural Science, the University of Texas McDonald Observatory and OceanGate. In 2014, Parazynski was appointed as a professor of practice at Arizona State University, and was designated ASU's first University Explorer. He subsequently founded Fluidity Technologies based on his intellectual property, a company aiming to manufacture and distribute novel control devices for mobility in 3-D space, for everything from drones and computer games to VR and surgical robotics.
Awards and honors Boy Scouts of America Eagle Scout (1977) National Institutes of Health Predoctoral Training Award in Cancer Biology (1983) Rhodes Scholarship finalist (1984) NASA Graduate Student Researcher's Award (1988) Stanford Medical Scholars Program (1988) Research Honors Award from Stanford Medical School (1989) NASA-Ames Certificate of Recognition (1990) Wilderness Medical Society Research Award (1991) Space Station Team Excellence Award (1996) NASA Exceptional Service Medals (1998, 1999) NASA Space Flight Medals (1994, 1997, 1998, 2001, 2008) NASA Distinguished Service Medals (2002, 2009) Ellis Island Family Heritage Award (2005) Aviation Week Laureate Award (2008) Arkansas Aviation Hall of Fame (2008) Explorers Club Lowell Thomas Award (2008) Honorary captain for the US luge team for the 2010 Winter Olympics (Shared with Ugly Betty television actor Eric Mabius.). National Eagle Scout Association's Outstanding Eagle Award (2012) Order of Merit of the Republic of Poland (2013) Doctor honoris Causa from the Military University of Technology of Warsaw (2013) Antarctica Service Medal (2014) United States Astronaut Hall of Fame (2016) Asteroid (534299) 2014 SP311 was renamed Parazynski (2021) While in medical school, he competed on the United States Development Luge Team and was ranked among the top ten competitors in the nation during the 1988 Olympic Trials. He also served as an Olympic Team Coach for the Philippines during the 1988 Olympic Winter Games in Calgary, Canada.
Medical career While an undergraduate at Stanford University, Parazynski studied antigenic shift in African sleeping sickness, using sophisticated molecular biology techniques. During medical school, he was awarded a NASA graduate student fellowship and conducted research at NASA Ames Research Center on fluid shifts that occur during human space flight. Additionally, he has been involved in the design of several exercise devices that are being developed for long-duration space flight, and has conducted research on high-altitude acclimatization. Parazynski has numerous publications in the field of space physiology, and has a particular expertise in human adaptation to stressful environments.
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