It's beyond the event horizon, but Pamela R. McCauley was a semi-finalist in the NASA selection for prospective astronaut at the Johnson Space Center in 1994.

Astronaut candidate selections are conducted every 2 years. The number selected depends upon the Space Shuttle flight rate, overall program requirements, and astronaut attrition.

Pamela was among 120 of the 2,962 applicants interviewed for a chance to be one of 20 as astronaut candidates, The final selections were announced in the fall with the new astronaut class reporting in early 1995.

“As I traveled to Houston to interview for the NASA astronaut program, I was incredibly nervous. I had dreamed of becoming an astronaut since I was a little girl, sleeping in the roll-away bed on the back porch of my Grandmother’s house in Spencer, Oklahoma,” she said at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2014.

A Martin Luther King, Jr. Visiting Associate Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics at MIT (1997-1999), Dr. McCauley's return to MIT was hosted by the Center for Engineering Systems Fundamentals; Technology and Policy Program; and Sociotechnical Systems Research Center. Her 2014 talk, "True Diversity," addressed diversity in STEM education, leadership, and innovation. She offered strategies for communities, organizations, and individuals to integrate diversity and achieve optimal outcomes for the next generation of global innovators.

An ergonomics and biomechanics expert, she is director of the Ergonomics Laboratory in the Department of Industrial Engineering and Management Systems at the University of Central Florida, where she leads human factors and ergonomics in disaster management research. She is the author of 80 technical papers, book chapters, conference proceedings and the best-selling ergonomics textbook, Ergonomics: Foundation Principles, Applications, and Technologies.