COE alumna Christina Koch headlines Red and White Week

During Red and White Week last fall, Chancellor Randy Woodson hosted his first live Red Chair Chat with Christina Koch, NASA astronaut.

Behind the stage, the moon and stars were projected to make it appear as if Woodson and Koch were talking in space, an appropriate setting for an astronaut who spent 328 days in space in 2019-20 and who is scheduled to return in 2025 to orbit the moon.

During his Red Chair Chats, Woodson interviews high-profile alumni, faculty and staff members, and friends of NC State University on video. Koch’s Red Chair Chat was part of the chancellor’s annual fall address. More than 400 people attended, and the event was live streamed on the NC State University YouTube channel. It can be viewed at go.ncsu.edu/christinakochredchairchat.

Koch earned a B.S. in physics and a B.S. and M.S. in electrical engineering from NC State. She gave the virtual commencement address in December 2020, and she even made a visit to campus while aboard the International Space Station in 2019 through a live virtual downlink.

During the conversation, Koch shared why she selected her two majors: physics, for her love of the theoretical, and electrical engineering, for reasons similar to those of many NC State engineers.

“Physics represented studying all of those just fundamental things that are universal,” she said. “But I also love tinkering. My dad and I had what we came to call ‘shed heaven.’ That’s the shed in the backyard where you tinker with everything, you fix the lawnmowers. And I loved hands-on. I loved taking things apart, figuring out how things worked. So, I knew I had to put those two things together.”

On her next trip to space, Koch will be going as a mission specialist for Artemis II. She is one of four astronauts selected by NASA for the mission, which will be testing out the life support systems of the Orion spacecraft. The crew will also be seeing if they can turn the spacecraft into a radiation shelter for long-duration space flight and deep space missions, among other objectives.

“We see our mission as humans to bring every one of y’all’s aspirations and dreams about exploring with us and to bring back the perspectives that we hope to gain looking back at Earth as it will be one small planet in the space of our window,” she said. “And what does that mean? What perspective does that give us as humans and how does it unite us?”

Later in the week, the College of Engineering closed out Red and White Week with a tailgate ahead of NC State’s football game against Clemson. Alumni stopped to celebrate the College’s 100th anniversary in 2023, eat BBQ and have a chance to meet Jim Pfaendtner, Louis Martin-Vega Dean of Engineering, who started his new position just a couple of months before Red and White Week.