Profile: To Boldly Go Where Few ChemEs Have Gone Before

Chemical engineer. Surgeon. Astronaut. Finding success in any one of those professions is a noteworthy accomplishment. By exploring all three of these career paths, Robert L. Satcher Jr., MD, has managed an incredible achievement. In 2009, Satcher spent 11 days in space, completing an orbit around the Earth on the Space Shuttle Atlantis and serving as the crew’s medical doctor onboard the International Space Station (ISS). “Going to space was a very rewarding experience,” says Satcher.

Satcher was born in Hampton, VA, and lived there through junior high school. He and his family then moved to Denmark, SC, and his parents worked at Voorhees College (now Voorhees Univ.), a historically Black university. During high school, Satcher was interested in math, chemistry, and physics, therefore chemical engineering became an obvious choice for him when picking a college major. He was accepted into the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) for chemical engineering, in addition to receiving a scholarship from DuPont that required him to intern at several of their locations during the summer. “All of that solidified my interest in chemical engineering,” recounts Satcher.

During his undergraduate years, Satcher worked on various research projects that were more life-science oriented. “The more I did that,” he said, “the more I realized that if I wanted to study these problems, where would they be applicable?” This was when Satcher began to find an interest in medicine and improving medical care through research. Still wanting to continue his chemical engineering education, he was accepted into an MD-PhD program, a combined curriculum between MIT and Harvard Medical School.

“Chemical engineering....