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Dr Roberta Bondar is an advocate for our unique planet after the rare opportunity to view Earth from space. As science and photography have always been linked in Dr. Bondar's life, it was natural that one of Bondar's assignments aboard the space shuttle Discovery in January 1992 was to take photographs of Earth.
Bondar
embarked on a career of scientific pursuits beginning in high school.
Using her camera in support of her studies, she
earned a Bachelor of Science degree in agriculture and zoology from the
University of Guelph, and developed new techniques for photomicroscopy
while pursuing a master's degree in experimental pathology at the University
of Western Ontario. She completed her doctorate in neurobiology at the
University of Toronto working extensively with black and white photography.
Bondar earned her medical degree at McMaster University with a special interest in space medicine. After completing her board certification in Neurology, she studied at Tufts New England Medical Center in Boston, specializing in neuro-ophthalmology, how we see and record the world around us. In 1984, she was one of the six original Canadian astronauts selected to train at NASA.
In January 1992, Bondar ascended into space aboard the NASA space shuttle Discovery, STS-42. In her role as an international payload specialist for the first International Microgravity Laboratory Mission (IML-1) she conducted life and material science experiments in space, becoming the world's first neurologist in space and Canada's first woman astronaut.
For over a decade, Bondar headed an international medical research team, with NASA and the University of New Mexico, to study the effects of short term and extended duration space flight on the physiology of blood flow in humans. Bondar is an advocate of using space medical research to provide insight into the recovery potential of the human body, as it simulates disease states during readaptation to earth's gravity. Bondar left the Canadian Space Agency in 1992, to pursue her research.
Upon returning to Earth, Bondar wrote Touching
The Earth a book in which she speaks of her space experience and her love
of the planet. Further honing her skills, she was an honors student in
professional nature photography at the Brook's Institute of Photography
in Santa Barbara, California. Bondar recently photographed all of Canada's
national parks with medium and large format cameras to document and celebrate
the beauty of the planet.
She is currently photographing the extremes of climate and structure of
planet Earth beginning with the deserts of North America.