Printable Biography of Roberta Bondar

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Dr. Roberta Bondar is a physician, scientist, astronaut and photographer. As a young child with a curious and active mind, she was influenced by her father, an amateur photographer, and an uncle, a semi-professional photographer who taught her early camera skills.

Her interest in science was evident even in high school, where she received Honorable Mention in the Canada Wide Science Fair, and directed her camera to the natural world around her. Summers were spent as a research assistant for the Federal Department of Fisheries and Forestry where she worked on genetics of eye pigments of the spruce budworm. She continued her work in the sciences, taking a combined undergraduate degree in agriculture and zoology at the University of Guelph. Using her camera to document scientific activities for her undergraduate courses, she progressed to developing new techniques for photomicroscopy with a fluorescence microscope, receiving a MS from the University of Western Ontario in experimental Pathology. She completed her doctorate in Neurobiology at the University of Toronto where, working with light and electron microscopes, she photographed thousands of specimens, then selected, developed and printed this record in support of her thesis. Her black and white and colour photographs have been presented in lectures and published in scientific journals.

Dr. Bondar went on to study medicine and obtained a MD at McMaster University. Her post-doctoral work at Tufts New England Medical Center, Boston, Massachusetts, was in neurophthalmology – how we see and record the world around us. She used photography to understand disease processes in the retina and optic nerve and learned about how our visual system processes information. Based on her education, ability to record and communicate, she was selected for experiments that she performed as an international payload specialist on the space shuttle Discovery in January, 1992. Using many different camera types and makes, she photographed everything from plants to humans, through microscopes and portholes. She also participated in the preparation and recording of the IMAX movie "Destiny in Space". On board Discovery, one of her many duties was to photograph the Earth, using NASA's camera of choice, the Hasselblad, working closely with NASA's Earth Observation team. The photographs from space have been published in scientific journals and reside in NASA's permanent photograph collections.

Attracted to the photographs that Ansel Adams had taken of the National Parks of the United States, and their influence on environmental identity, Dr. Bondar decided to move her photography to the Earth's surface, exploring it with a larger vision. She enrolled in the undergraduate course in professional nature photography at the Brook's Institute of Photography, Santa Barbara, CA, where she was an honors student, submitting a portfolio of photographs on Death Valley National Park.