Astronaut Tracy Dyson touches down at UCI 

When Tracy Dyson was pursuing a postdoctoral fellowship in environmental science at the University of California, Irvine, in 1998, she received a call from NASA. The call confirmed she would become an astronaut. Twenty-seven years and three space voyages later, Dyson spoke to a crowd of around 500 people at UCI’s Beckman Center on Jan. 15. 

The Evening with a NASA Astronaut was a public event that featured Dyson’s talk, a video of her most recent space mission aboard the Soyuz MS-25 spacecraft from March to September 2024 and a question-and-answer session. The event was hosted by Atmospheric Integrated Research at the University of California, Irvine (AirUCI), an organized research unit focused on air pollution, sustainability, climate change and green technology. 

“Our mission was full of science and spacewalks, launches, landings, visiting vehicles, Earth observations, lots of everyday life — but also a few unexpected events,” Dyson told the audience.

One of those unexpected events occurred during Dyson’s recent voyage as she prepared to embark on a spacewalk — a time when astronauts venture into space, fully suited up, often for scientific experiments on the International Space Station. Water started leaking out of the service and cooling umbilical, which supplied cooling water, power and oxygen. The leaked water instantly froze, covering Dyson’s helmet and blocking her view. The six-and-a-half-hour spacewalk was cut short, stopping the scheduled retrieval of a radio transmitter and the collection of microorganism samples. 

“To say this was heartbreaking was an understatement, but we did get 31 minutes of spacewalking time out in this ordeal,” Dyson said.

The astronaut and UCI alumna began her higher educational journey at California State University, Fullerton (CSUF). There, Dyson studied atmospheric chemistry under the now distinguished professor and co-director of AirUCI, Barbara J. Finlayson-Pitts. Dyson went on to earn a doctoral degree in physical chemistry at the University of California, Davis and continued in her science pursuit with the Camille and Henry Dreyfus postdoctoral fellowship at UCI.

During the question-and-answer portion of the event, Dyson was asked how her education experience applies to conducting experiments in space. The astronaut said she relies more on her construction experience. Her father was an electrician, so she grew up learning how to wire a house. 

“I like to joke that I actually use my skills as a construction worker a lot more on board the space station than I do anything else,” Dyson said, “because things are breaking. But where my Ph.D. really came into play, I think, was in what it takes to get a Ph.D. It takes a lot of hours that just don’t get accounted for. I mean, you are in the lab, you’re working things out, you’re bugging your professor — the whole process of studying something so intently and so intensely.”

AirUCI is made up of 32 faculty members spanning eight departments and five schools. Students and faculty collaborate to write proposals for state-of-the-art equipment and develop research that legislators can implement into public policy. Because of the work conducted within AirUCI, it has been named as one of the top three research groups that study atmospheric integrated research — the other two being in Germany and Switzerland.

Finlayson-Pitts recognized Dyson’s educational spark at both CSUF and UCI.

“She is special, and she comes across as that all the time,” Finlayson-Pitts told New University. “She is very bright, obviously, very engaged, very focused and when she decides to do something, she does it, as you can see. She clearly has a lot of leadership qualities, able to really coalesce people around goals.”

When asked what one should do if they want to follow in Dyson’s footsteps, she reminded audience members of their individual passions. 

“Whatever you are doing in life, enjoy it. I mean, do it with passion,” Dyson said to the audience. “Because when you do the things that you really enjoy doing, the best thing in you is going to come out, and that’s what you want. The results that you get are going to be far more fabulous because there’s a piece of you. And so I just encourage you, whether you want to be an astronaut or some other profession that may be your passion, that you follow and don’t accept anything less than that.”

Cassandra Nava is a Features Staff Writer for the winter 2025 quarter. She can be reached at cassan2@uci.edu.

Edited by Sofia Feeney. 

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