Astronaut N. Currie-Gregg's post-NASA career

An astronaut with four space shuttle missions has retired from NASA. Nancy Currie-Gregg left the agency after a career that began even before she became an astronaut.

"Nancy brought so much to NASA during the course of her career," said Pat Forrester, chief of the Astronaut Office at NASA's Johnson Space Center. "She made great contributions not just to the astronaut office and the Johnson Space Center but to the entire agency. We appreciate her service over the past several decades and wish her well in the future."

Currie-Gregg first came to NASA as a flight simulation engineer in 1987. She was selected as an astronaut in 1990, completed her astronaut candidate training in 1991 and flew on her first mission in 1993. As a mission specialist on space shuttle Endeavour's STS-57 mission that year, she helped retrieve the European Retrievable Carrier satellite and conducted experiments inside the pressurized laboratory SPACEHAB on its first flight.

She returned to space onboard space shuttle Discovery in 1995 for STS-70 and helped to deploy a Tracking and Data Relay Satellite. In 1998, she was part of the first assembly mission for the International Space Station, during Endeavour's STS-88 mission. And she visited the Hubble Space Telescope in 2002 as part of space shuttle Columbia's servicing mission, STS-109. In all, she spent 1,000 hours in space.

Her work for NASA did not end there, however. Following the space shuttle Columbia accident in 2003, Currie-Gregg was selected to lead the Space Shuttle Program's Safety and Mission Assurance Office. She also served as manager of the Habitability and Human Factors Office; senior technical advisor in the Automation, Robotics and Simulation Division; deputy director of Johnson's Engineering Directorate; and chief engineer for NASA's Engineering and Safety Center. At the time of her retirement, she was principal engineer for NASA's Engineering and Safety Center.

Currie-Gregg was born in Wilmington, Delaware, but considers Troy, Ohio, to be her hometown. She earned a bachelor's degree in biological science from The Ohio State University; a master's in safety engineering from the University of Southern California; and a doctorate in industrial engineering from the University of Houston. She achieved the rank of colonel in the U.S. Army before retiring in 2005 and has logged more than 4,000 hours of flight time in a variety of rotary-wing and fixed-wing aircraft.