Contemporary Polymaths – Who is Mae Carol Jemison?

"Never be limited by other people's limited imaginations." Mae Carol Jemison

There must be something about astronauts … Dr. Mae Carol Jemison is the second astronaut in our Polymath Hall of Fame! When Mae Jemison went into orbit aboard the space shuttle Endeavour on 12 September 1992, she was primarily described as the "first black woman in space". Yet a closer look reveals a chemical engineer, physician, Peace Corps medical officer, NASA mission specialist, patent-holding entrepreneur, university professor, non-profit leader, polyglot, choreographer — and lifelong dancer. The sheer range of those roles is why we must frame her career through the lens of polymathy.

On 14 April 2025, as television anchors tracked Blue Origin’s first all-women sub-orbital flight, producers brought Dr Jemison on air to supply perspective. Thirty-three years after her own mission aboard Endeavour, she still commanded attention—correcting an interviewer’s “mankind” to the more inclusive “humankind” and reminding viewers that words shape who feels included in the future and that exploration belongs to everyone. Her cameo, equal parts engineer’s briefing and anthropologist’s language lesson, condensed the Jemison signature: seamlessly shifting between technical precision, social critique and cultural fluency.

Genuine polymaths pair breadth with depth and, crucially, integration. They do not juggle hobbies; they meld competencies. Jemison’s résumé is an exemplar for interdisciplinary thinking, but the stronger case for her polymathy lies in how those strands reinforce one another.

The story began in Alabama but soon moves to Chicago. Her parents valued education. Charlie Jemison, a maintenance supervisor, and Dorothy Jemison, a teacher, took their children to Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry and the Field Museum of Natural History to visit and learn. Grade-school Mae toggled between the school science club and dance classes that ranged from Haitian folkloric steps to swing. She devoured science-fiction novels, studied Swahili for fun and told teachers she intended to be both a scientist and a ballerina.

Joining Stanford University at the age of 16 did not worry Jemison because , as she later stated, she was helped by naivety, stubbornness and youthful arrogance. At Stanford in the mid-1970s she graduated with a B.S. in chemical engineering and a B.A. in African-American studies, pursued studies related to her childhood interest in space and first considered applying to NASA, whilst at the same time choreographing Out of the Shadows, a performance piece that merged modern dance with Black social history. She also led the Black Student Union and lobbied the university to broaden its curriculum—an early sign that her scientific ambitions were inseparable from cultural politics.

Medical school at Cornell amplified the pattern. Between rotations in New York hospitals she volunteered in Thailand, Cuba and Kenya, then joined the Peace Corps as area medical officer for Liberia and Sierra Leone. There she ran vaccination campaigns, supervised field surgery, trained local staff and negotiated supplies. The experience taught her that health, logistics, anthropology and diplomacy are a single ecosystem—a lesson she would later apply inside NASA.

Selected as an astronaut in 1987, Jemison carried that systems mindset into spaceflight. On STS-47 she monitored bone-cell growth in zero g, probed fluid dynamics and began each communications shift with the Star Trek salute “Hailing frequencies open,” a nod to fictional polymath Lieutenant Uhura. Tucked inside her locker were symbolic objects: a West African Bundu statue, a photo of pioneering aviator Bessie Coleman and a poster from the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre. Even in orbit she could find the links between engineering, history and artistic endeavor.

When she resigned from NASA in 1993 she did not settle into a single discipline but multiple arenas. In addition to writing books and holding various academic roles, she served on the board of directors of the World Sickle Cell Foundation from 1990 to 1992, founded The Jemison Group Inc. (a consulting firm which considers the sociocultural impact of technological advancements and design) in 1993 and also founded the Dorothy Jemison Foundation for Excellence - named in honor of her mother. One of the projects of the foundation is The Earth We Share, a science camp for students aged 12 to 16 with the goal of increasing scientific literacy by developing the students’ abilities in both critical thinking and problem solving and using the scientific method to identify and solve a real problem facing their communities.

In 1993, Jemison also appeared in an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, becoming the first real-life astronaut to appear on the show.

In 2012, backed by DARPA seed money, she launched the 100 Year Starship project, convening propulsion physicists, ethicists, investors and artists to plan an interstellar mission within a century and, in doing so, to tackle Earth-bound problems of energy, governance and equity. Annual symposia featured panels where an engineer might follow a poet reading speculative verse.

Dance never receded. In a widely watched TED Talk she argued that kinesthetic intelligence trains the same pattern-recognition muscles needed for orbital rendezvous and surgical diagnosis. She has said that a dancer’s proprioception helped her orient her body in zero gravity, and she often illustrates ideas about planetary ecology by moving across a stage rather than by pointing to a slide. For Jemison, the body is a thinking instrument.

Languages provide another thread. Fluent in Russian, Japanese and Swahili, she can brief cosmonauts in their own tongue or moderate panels in Nairobi without an interpreter. She also listens for the politics embedded in vocabulary; her gentle correction of “mankind” to “humankind” during the Blue Origin broadcast.

If one searches for the hinge that makes all these domains click, imagination stands out. Jemison has warned students never to limit themselves “because of others’ limited imagination,” and she holds that societies likewise rise or fall on the scope of their collective dreaming. That credo explains why she pairs hard-science ventures with outreach to underserved classrooms, and why her starship conferences run writing classes alongside materials-science workshops.

So what does her trajectory teach aspirants who hope to cultivate polymathic lives?

Guard Curiosity Like Intellectual Property: Treat imagination as a finite resource: block out weekly “investigation hours” where you read, prototype, or tinker with ideas that have no immediate deadline. Put those sessions on your calendar —because once curiosity is eroded by reactive work, polymathic range withers.

"The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science." Albert Einstein

Carve Depth Before You Add Breadth: Disciplined depth generates the confidence to roam; Jemison’s Stanford and Cornell credentials gave her permission to improvise across borders. Emulate that rigor by selecting one or two domains to master before broadening attention. Depth is the launchpad that lets your later pivots be taken seriously. Translate competence across contexts by listing three of your skills, then brainstorm alternate arenas where each skill is rare and therefore valuable.

Cross-Train Intentionally: Every quarter, every 6 months, every year, enroll in a skill far from your primary lane—data scientist learns choreography; designer studies circuit theory. Keep a “transfer journal” where you note parallels. You’ll build neural bridges that spark creative solutions when disciplines collide.

Stretch Your Horizon: Timescale matters; a hundred-year horizon pressures thinkers to integrate fields that quarterly planning ignores. Whilst you don’t have to look 100 years hence, do look beyond the immediate. Try reverse-engineering a longer-term goal (“What would it take for our company to matter in 2040?”). Big temporal canvases expose blind spots—ethics, environment, governance—that quarterly cycles ignore yet will ultimately shape long-term viability.

Make Inclusion a Core Engineering Spec: This has become a populist cause célèbre so we tread carefully but … include ethical inclusion as an engineering parameter, not an after-thought; design projects so that diverse voices are structural, not decorative. This avoids the dangers of group-think, echo-chambers or herd mentality. Celebrate diverse collective thinking.

Finally, Attention is a scarce resource: Jemison protects hers by refusing superficial distinctions between art and science, choosing instead to interrogate whatever intersection seems most prevalent at the time.

“Who wants to be uncreative? Who wants to be illogical? Talent would run from either of these fields if you said you had to choose either. Then they'll go to something where they think, ‘Well, I can be creative and logical at the same time’ […] You see, I always assumed I would go into space, because I followed all of this. But I also loved the arts and sciences. You see, when I was growing up as a little girl and as a teenager, I loved designing and making doll clothes and wanting to be a fashion designer. I took art and ceramics. I loved dance. And I also avidly followed the Gemini and the Apollo programs. I had science projects and tons of astronomy books. I took calculus and philosophy. I wondered about infinity and the Big Bang theory. And when I was at Stanford, I found myself, my senior year, chemical engineering major, half the folks thought I was a political science and performing arts major. And that's what we have to reconcile in our minds, how these things fit together”

Mae Carol Jemison

None of those lessons arrives as a numbered list in her speeches—they emerge, implicitly, from the way she lives the connections. Her story closes the distance between rocket labs and rehearsal studios, between the genetic code and the coding of spacecraft software. Calling her a polymath is less about tallying degrees than about tracing the linkages resulting from her expanding curiosity. In that sense she offers an interesting intellectual template.

Here are a couple of interesting reference sources to learn more:

https://www.womenshistory.org/education-resources/biographies/mae-jemison

https://www.ted.com/talks/mae_jemison_teach_arts_and_sciences_together/transcript?