Topic: Nicole Stott

Nicole Marie Passonno Stott is an American engineer and a NASA astronaut. She served as a Flight Engineer on ISS Expedition 20 and Expedition 21 and was a Mission Specialist on STS-129. She is currently flying again as a Mission Specialist on STS-133.

Stott was born in Albany, New York and resides in Clearwater, Florida. She attended St. Petersburg College studying aviation administration, graduated with a B.S. degree from Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in 1987, and received her M.S. degree in Engineering Management from the University of Central Florida in 1992. Nicole Stott began her career in 1987 as a structural design engineer with Pratt & Whitney Government Engines in West Palm Beach, Florida. She spent a year with the Advanced Engines Group performing structural analyses of advanced jet engine component designs. Stott is an instrument rated private pilot.

In 1988, Stott joined NASA at the Kennedy Space Center (KSC), Florida as an Operations Engineer in the Orbiter Processing Facility (OPF). After six months, she was detailed to the Director of Shuttle Processing as part of a two-person team tasked with assessing the overall efficiency of Shuttle processing flows, and implementing tools for measuring the effectiveness of improvements. She was the NASA KSC Lead for a joint Ames/KSC software project to develop intelligent scheduling tools. The Ground Processing Scheduling System (GPSS) was developed as the technology demonstrator for this project. GPSS was a success at KSC, and also a commercial success that is part of the PeopleSoft suite of software products. During her time at KSC, Stott also held a variety of positions within NASA Shuttle Processing, including Vehicle Operations Engineer; NASA Convoy Commander; Shuttle Flow Director for Endeavour; and Orbiter Project Engineer for Columbia. During her last two years at KSC, she was a member of the Space Station Hardware Integration Office and relocated to Huntington Beach, California where she served as the NASA Project Lead for the ISS truss elements under construction at the Boeing Space Station facility. In 1998, she joined the Johnson Space Center (JSC) team in Houston, Texas as a member of the NASA Aircraft Operations Division, where she served as a Flight Simulation Engineer (FSE) on the Shuttle Training Aircraft (STA).