Jessica Meir

Origins and early life

Jessica Meir was born in Caribou, Maine, to Josef Haim Meir — a Baghdadi Jewish Israeli physician, born in Baghdad in 1925, who reached Mandatory Palestine as a child, was studying medicine in Beirut when the 1948 war broke out and drove an ambulance in Israel — and to Ulla Britt Karlsson, a Swedish nurse raised Christian.

Work and career

Her mother did not convert; Meir identifies as culturally Jewish, went to synagogue as a child and had a bat mitzvah, which is the stated, first-person basis for her presence here. She became a comparative physiologist before an astronaut: a doctorate at Scripps on how emperor penguins dive, earned while scuba diving beside them under the Antarctic ice, then bar-headed geese raised to study how they cross the Himalayas on almost no oxygen, then a post at Harvard Medical School.

NASA selected her in 2013; she launched on Soyuz MS-15 on 25 September 2019, and on 18 October that year she and Christina Koch made the first spacewalk in history performed entirely by women. Among the few personal items she carried up were an Israeli flag and a pair of socks printed with Stars of David and menorahs. Time named her one of the hundred most influential people of 2020. Since 26 July 2026 she has commanded the International Space Station as head of Expedition 75; on 1 September 2026 she and Sophie Adenot spent six hours and forty-nine minutes outside it, installing a navigation aid and swabbing the hull for microorganisms.