Rhea Seddon

Margaret Rhea Seddon, who earned the MD degree at UT’s Medical College in 1973, became a NASA astronaut in 1979. A three-flight veteran with over 722 hours in space, she was a mission specialist on STS 51D (1985) and STS-40 (1991) and was the payload commander on STS-58 in 1993. She retired from NASA in 1997 and became the assistant Chief Medical Officer of the Vanderbilt Medical Group in Nashville. On her first space flight in 1985 aboard the space shuttle Discovery, television viewers around the world noticed an orange-and-white UT decal taped to the wall of the crew deck.