Quotes from Kathleen Rubins

When I was at Stanford, I was actually in the cancer biology program, but I mostly focused on infectious disease.

We're pretty interested in microbial communities on-board space stations. It's a closed-loop system. Our water is recycled; our air is recycled.

We have to engineer devices that are going to work in space stations. Those same things are going to work in the most remote regions on Earth.

You need nerves of steel if climbing aboard a rocket is your career path.

They say that in space, nobody can hear you scream. The first time I stepped out of the airlock, I was ready to scream - not because I was scared but because I was so excited to see the Earth below me.

When you go to vacuum in the airlock and you take the hose off the front of your space suit, there's a little bit of water in there, and you can see that sublimate and ice crystals form and fly away. My thought at that moment was, 'Oh, we are not kidding at vacuum here; we are really in space.'

When I started working at NASA and understanding what the capabilities really were of the space station and the space program, one of the biggest draws for me was the ability to do experiments in space. We can do a number of experiments where gravity is actually a variable.

I decided to do graduate studies in virology at Stanford University in California because it had a hospital, which made working on clinical applications easier.

When I was in grad school, I wanted to be in academia forever.

There's actually an incredible amount of parallels between working in central Congo in a remote, isolated village and doing research aboard the space station.

My lab used to do gene expression and genomics, and we did a lot of sequencing samples from virus outbreaks.