For Ansley Collins Browns ’01, what started as a senior project for BSC’s Harrison Honors Program set the trajectory for a lifetime career.

Browns came to the Hilltop from Tallahassee, seeking small classes and a tightly knit community. As a math major, she wasn’t sure how that field would lead her to fulfill a long-held dream of working in Mission Control at NASA, but she was drawn to it because of the faculty. ”I knew I wanted to study something I enjoyed with engaging professors and classmates, and the Math Department fit the bill,” she says.

Browns chose to focus her senior honors project on the history of the astronaut program. On the advice of physics professor Dr. Duane Pontius ’81, she spent fall break 2000 at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston conducting interviews with people involved in astronaut selection process. She even met a personal hero, astronaut Janice Voss, who flew on five shuttle missions from 1993-1999. Encouraged by her interview subjects to apply for a job, she returned to Houston over spring break 2001 for interviews. She has worked at NASA ever since.

Over the last 20 years, Browns has fulfilled that dream of working in Mission Control. She currently services as a Payload Facility Integrator in the International Space Station Vehicle Office. “I coordinate teams across the country to ensure that the research facilities onboard the International Space Station are in good working order for our astronauts to do experiments,” she says.

From singing in the concert choir to taking formative classes outside her major such as Dr. Mark Lester’s “Civil Rights and Justice” and Dr. Mark Levey’s “Remembering World War II,” Browns says her experience on the Hilltop was essential in challenging her to engage with topics outside her area of knowledge and look at the world with a broader perspective.

“As a federal government employee, I work with people from many different organizations, cultures, and areas of expertise to expand human exploration,” she says. “My time at BSC was extremely influential in preparing me to communicate and work across boundaries, to be open to the perspectives of others with different backgrounds than mine, and to work together with other people to make the world a better place.”

After two decades of calling NASA and Houston home, Browns and her husband of 11 years, Scott, whom she met her first day on the job, are excited to see what comes next in the field of space exploration. NASA’s Artemis program – which aims to send humans back to the moon – is not only named for a woman (Apollo’s mythical twin sister), but is also largely run by women, and aims to ensure that the next footprint on the moon will be made by a woman.

Even so, Browns is already thinking beyond the moon: “I’d love to be part of a program that lands people on Mars.”

This story was included in a special math and computer science edition of From the Hilltop, Birmingham-Southern’s alumni email newsletter.

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