"I spent my formative years on the Choctaw Indian reservation in Philadelphia, Mississpi, and in Missoula, Montana, where I loved playing outdoors, watching farm animals, and observing everything around me. I believe living in these settings motivated me to explore and respect nature."

"Reach out to teachers and school counselors who can connect you to science and engineering camps."

"If having access to instruments impacts other students as it did me, kids would have more opportunities to engage with a broader group of people and to gain greater understanding of the world."

"SPORT is the first project I have worked that I will be able to see from beginning to end, so right now, I am focused on assuring that it will be successful."

"I am currently a member of the Youth Motivation Task Force Advisory Board at Alabama A&M University (AAMU)."

"To be honest, physics was one of my most difficult subjects, but I was impressed by my college physics professor, Dr. M.C. George."

"So if we want people to engage emotionally with robots, or avatars (or any other kind of character that is rigged up to an NLP system), we need to consider using body language as part of that system. We humans are hardwired that way."

"Videos do an excellent job of conveying the importance of body language. A great video to watch is The History Channel’s Secrets of Body Language."

"Body language makes up about 40% of natural language: This can be automatically generated."

"As designers of robots (or avatars) we need to consider these statistics and consider how to integrate body language into natural language communication. Therefor Geppetto Labs has built a platform to automatically generate body language and coordinate it with what a robot (or avatar) is saying."

"Eight years after starting the Ph.D., while working full time, giving birth to two children, staying active in my church and public service organization, and keeping my husband happy enough not to leave me, I finished my Ph.D. in Physics making me the first African American Female in the State of Alabama to earn a Ph.D. in Physics."

"I’m type O-positive. What type are you?"

"I’m still in awe of seeing the Earth from the vantage point we had from the Dragon vehicle as we were approaching the International Space Station, You can see it in pictures, you can even dream about those pictures, but there’s just something that happens when you see it with your own eyes."

"I think they need to pursue their dreams," Epps said. "You may not make it to space, but will you make it way further than if you had never pursued that dream."

"It was amazing beautiful seeing the earth from that vantage point," Epps said. "But for me, one of the big things is that now I want to see trees, I want to see people, I want to touch things and experience things here on Earth more than I did before. And it's just made me appreciate things I think just a little bit more and the simple things, not the big things but the simple things in life that make me happy."

"Even just the weight of your head and trying to hold it up and some of the muscle pains that you'll have because you haven't held your head up in what eight months almost for us"

"I figured that I’d become a great scientist and then maybe, maybe, maybe in the future I’ll be able to apply, if I establish myself well enough"

"It just looks otherworldly to me … like, what you would see if you were on the moon."

"Communication is paramount to your success, You need to articulate how your great idea is impactful, whether to your community, society or economy. Having strong technical skills is critical, but you must also be able to work with others and communicate effectively to bring those ideas to life."

"This downward spiral is especially severe for girls of color, girls with disabilities, girls living in poverty and girls who are learning English as a new language, The United States cannot afford to lose more than half of its talent and the fresh perspective that women and minorities can bring to these critical fields. We must work together across the boundaries of skin color and gender."

"My greatest challenge is climbing the ladder of success, and pulling others behind me," she said. "If you see a turtle sitting on top of a fence post, you know he had help getting there"

"Read, read, read, and learn, learn, learn."

"thought that it had to be a tall, pink man that interacted with the astronauts, and that nobody was going to listen to a little brown woman."

"Doesn't matter where you are from or what you look like. Doesn't matter if you're poor. A human being can learn and can achieve whatever they set out to do (or come near to it). I've spent my life studying human potential—and stretching my own.Don't give up. No matter how bad or scary it gets. Not even when you ask yourself "What am I doing here?""

"We have to do something like this to get them interested in science. Sometimes they are not aware of the number of black scientists, and don't even know of the career opportunities until it is too late."

"I am a Christian with room to spare and feel that we all need to do our part in times of trouble, we are a reasonable drive from many of the affected areas. I have already reached out to friends of mine in the Raleigh-Durham area. I also have lots of friends in this area who would be willing to help."

"I’ve always liked math."

"Be true to yourself, don’t compromise yourself, ask a lot of questions... that’s literally our job!."

"So that's the beautiful thing about astrobiology. [Proving the existence of life] is like the ultimate episode of CSI. You're putting together the biggest forensic case of your life to prove who the killer is, and you’ve got to be able to go to the jury and prove beyond reasonable doubt that you know who's done it."

"You had a lot of people there – a lot of people from all different cultures – and we all worked together. And if I ever needed anything – I know that doesn't sound believable, but if I ever needed anything -- they were there to help out"

"You know, it wasn't difficult. It seemed like my path was paved for me. It was in the Lord's hands, and he said, 'This is what's going to happen"

"I'm just in there working, just doing my thing, trying to do the best that I can do. And knowing that I was among the minority there that I had to do my best if I was going to stay there"

"I hope that if my students can believe it, they can achieve it,"

"find your passion—the thing that makes you excited to wake up in the morning and bring your best self to work. Once you find that, it doesn’t feel like work."

"It’s about everybody having an opportunity, everybody having the access and ability to follow their dreams."

"I was always passionate about learning, curiosity, and science, but once I realized I could contribute to space exploration, I knew it was a perfect fit."

"Back at home, we all have a lot of work to do. But from here, Earth sure looks like a perfect world."

"I truly want us to live in a world 50 or 100 years from now where people are jumping in their rockets like the Jetsons and there are families bouncing around on the moon with their kid in a spacesuit. … I also think if we are going to live in that world, we better conquer childhood cancer along the way."

"" Set a “mission” for yourself and write it somewhere where you will see it daily"."

""Sometimes a woman needs to show her competence before the guys “accept” her and trust her"."

""I also should credit all the women pilots before me, including the Women Airforce Service Pilots of WWII and the Mercury 13 women who passed the difficult astronaut exams in the early 1960s"."

""A leader must be collaborative and competent, and your team won’t care if you are a man or a woman"."

""It’s hard for the astronauts to meet everybody because we have responsibilities in the office and families we need to see, so we try to spread out"."

"Informal learning is more difficult because you don’t always know what you need to know"

"I asked my crew to be creative, to think about everything that could go wrong during the mission that no one has thought about yet and bring it to the attention of the flight control team"

""I believe failure can be caused by lack of focus on that mission, or allowing too many distractions into your life"."

"I have always loved science museums in particular—the interactive hands-on museums ... They just exude creativity."