Michael Gernhardt
Astronaut
NASA Johnson Space Center

Michael Gernhardt is a NASA astronaut at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston. He has flown four space shuttle missions during which he had a variety of responsibilities including flight engineer, on-orbit " blue shift" lead, robot arm operator, and lead space walker. He has performed four space walks, including three on STS-104 in July of this year, in which the airlock was installed, activated and used to make the first space walks from the International Space Station. Dr. Gernhardt also served as NASA's principle investigator on multi-laboratory effort to develop a new decompression protocol, which uses exercise during oxygen prebreathe to increase nitrogen elimination prior to space walks from the Space Station.

Dr. Gernhardt was born in Mansfield Ohio. He has a B.S degree in physics from Vanderbilt University, and M.S and PhD degrees from the University of Pennsylvania, where he developed new decompression models based on tissue bubble dynamics. Prior to joining the astronaut core, he was a professional deep-sea diver, and later vice president at Oceaneering International, the worlds largest publicly owned sub sea contractor. He was also president and founder of Oceaneering Space Systems, a subsidiary company transferring subsea technology to the space program. He is experienced in surface supplied air and mixed gas diving, bounce bell diving and heliox saturation diving and has made over 700 deep sea dives. Prior to his commercial diving career he was a scuba diving instructor and charter boat captain in the Caribbean.

His hobbies include swimming, running, boating, fishing, art collection and fiction writing.