Celebrating a Decade of Women in the Lead

The tenth annual Women’s Leadership Conference is sponsored by The Center for Women’s Leadership at Babson in collaboration with the Babson Association for Women MBAs.  View the full schedule here.

In 1983 Ride became the first American woman in space with more than 343 cumulative hours of space flight. She retired from NASA to become a Science Fellow at Stanford University, then director of the California Space Institute and professor at the University of California, San Diego, where she began her crusade to encourage young women to study science and math.

In 1999 Ride joined space.com, a website about the space industry, and was soon named President, a position she held until September, 2000.

After leaving space.com, Ride started EarthKAM, an Internet-based NASA project that allows middle school classes to shoot and download photos of Earth from space. Her recent enterprise, Imaginary Lines, is an organization founded to provide support for girls interested in science, math and technology. One instrument of this mission is the Sally Ride Club, created for upper elementary and middle school girls across the country.

An advocate for improved science education, Ride has written and/or collaborated on five children's books, To Space and Back, Voyager: An Adventure to the Edge of the Solar System, The Third Planet: Exploring the Earth from Space, The Mystery of Mars, and Exploring Our Solar System.