Former Astronaut to Address WOSA

WASHINGTON, D.C., Sept. 16 -- Former astronaut Ellen Ochoa will be the featured speaker at a meeting hosted by Women in OSA (WOSA) during the 2002 Optical Society of America (OSA) Annual Meeting and Exhibit, to be held Sept. 29-Oct. 3 in Orlando, Fla. The WOSA meeting will take place Sept. 30 from 12:30 - 1:30 p.m.

Ochoa, a veteran of four space flights has logged over 978 hours in space. She was a mission specialist on flight STS-56 (1993), payload commander on STS-66 (1994) and a mission specialist and flight engineer on STS-96 (1999) and STS-110 (2002).

As a doctoral student at Stanford and later as a researcher at Sandia National Laboratories and NASA Ames Research Center, Ochoa investigated optical systems for performing information processing. She is a co-inventor on three patents for an optical inspection system, an optical object recognition method and a method for noise removal in images. As chief of the Intelligent Systems Technology Branch at Ames, she supervised 35 engineers and scientists in the research and development of computational systems for aerospace missions. Ochoa has presented numerous papers at technical conferences and in scientific journals.

All meeting attendees and exhibitors are invited to the WOSA event.