Julie Payette

Julie Payette, OC, CQ (born October 20, 1963) is a Canadian engineer and astronaut. Payette has completed two spaceflights, STS-96 and STS-127, logging more than 25 days in space. She served as Chief Astronaut for the CSA, and has served in other roles for both NASA and CSA, such as CAPCOM.

In July 2013, Julie Payette was named Chief Operating Officer for the Montreal Science Centre in the Old Port of Montreal.

Payette was born in Montreal, Quebec. She attended elementary and secondary (Collège Mont-Saint-Louis) schools in Montreal. She also went to Collège Regina Assumpta for three years. In 1982 she completed an International Baccalaureate Diploma at the United World College of the Atlantic in South Wales, UK. For her undergraduate studies, Payette enrolled in McGill University where she completed a B.Eng. in Electrical Engineering in 1986, after which Payette completed a M.A.Sc. in Computer Engineering at theUniversity of Toronto in 1990.^[1]

Between 1986 and 1988, Payette worked as a systems engineer for IBM Canada's Science Engineering division. From 1988 to 1990, as a graduate student at the University of Toronto, she was involved in a high-performance computer architecture project and worked as a teaching assistant. At the beginning of 1991, Payette joined the Communications and science department of the IBM Research Laboratory in Zürich, Switzerland, for a one year visiting scientist appointment. When she returned to Canada, in January 1992, she joined the Speech Research Group of Bell-Northern Research in Montreal where she was responsible for a project in telephone speech understanding using compute