However, Nance got a stark reminder of how precious life on earth is in 2017 when she discovered she carried the cancer-causing mutated BRCA2 gene. Nance credits her community of support and mentors who believed in her for helping her stay on the path she's on today. "That sort of mounts until it becomes unbearable and people leave, so I had to push past those boundaries and those messages over and over." "There's so much that contributes to someone feeling like they don’t belong, implicit and explicit messages," Nance said. and that’s a really difficult (and) isolating," said Nance, explaining that she attributes this to a "misrepresentation" of women as not being interested in science and math. "There are not a lot of women in astronomy and in physics in general.
But during her journey studying the stars, she learned that the path for women - especially women of color - is far from stellar. Later this year, Nance will complete her Ph.D. "I hope that will get me one step closer to going to space," she said. Many moons (and years) later, she became an analog astronaut, living in a Mars simulation. "I knew that I wanted to continue and devote the rest of my life to studying the stars."
It was always something that I wanted to continue to learn about and dive into and explore," she added. “I love feelings small and I love asking questions about our universe," Nance told TODAY in a segment aired Monday, June 5. Nance's passion for the stars began at a young age, when she began stargazing with her father growing up in Texas. In her new book, " Starstruck," which hits shelves June 6, the 30-year-old Egyptian-American astrophysicist and analog astronaut recounts her incredible journey, including a preventive double mastectomy at 26 and a subsequent stint as a swimsuit model. Sarafina El-Badry Nance is carving out a place for herself in the astrophysics field and challenging stereotypes about female scientists along the way.
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