HONORARY DOCTORATE
Roberta Bondar receives Cape Breton University’s highest honour
CBU honours aviation pioneer.
When you consider Dr. Roberta Bondar was aboard the space shuttle Discovery on July 22, 1992, spending the 25th anniversary of her flight in the place that honours another great aviation pioneer seems appropriate.
Bondar received an honorary doctorate of letters from Cape Breton University Saturday at a special convocation at the Alexander Graham Bell National Historic Site.
Like Bell, who helped achieved Canada’s first powered flight with the Silver Dart, Bondar is also a flight pioneer, being Canada’s first woman in space and the world’s first neurologist in space.
With a replica of the Silver Dart hanging overhead, Bondar told an audience of about 100 that she hoped her work would inspire others to be the best that they can be. She credits her parents for encouraging her and believes their example inspired her.
“I look at myself as being a cheerleader for women and a role model for men,” said Bondar, who is also inspired by
the work of Mabel Bell.
“Look at Mabel Bell and the kinds of things that she stood for and the kinds of things that she tried to do in terms of art and science and technology and business and those are all the facets of my life as well so that’s a kind of a neat connection, separated a bit by time but
still a connection.”
Bondar was honoured for her pioneering work in space medicine research. She conducted experiments in the shuttle’s first international microgravity laboratory. For more than a decade at NASA Dr. Bondar headed an international research team, continuing to
find new connections between astronauts recovering from the microgravity of space and neurological illnesses here on Earth. Her techniques have been used in clinical studies at the B.I. Deaconess Medical Center, a teaching hospital of Harvard Medical School, and at the University of New Mexico.
As if being an astronaut wasn’t enough, Bondar has been recognized with the NASA Space Medal and inducted into the Canadian Medical Hall of Fame. She is a recipient of the Order of Canada and even has a star on Canada’s Walk of Fame. She co-founded the Roberta Bondar Foundation, a not-forprofit charitable organization to reconnect Canadians to the natural environment. She is also a noted photographer with her latest photo exhibit, “Light in the Land” on display at the Bell Museum until August 31.
Bondar confessed she is also a big fan of Cape Breton.
“I love Cape Breton. It’s one place that I love visiting — it has so many different biological communities, let alone ones with human beings — it’s an extraordinary place on the Atlantic and I really love looking at the fall foliage when I’m here in the fall. And in the summer, it’s just spectacular.”
Part of the convocation ceremony featured Canada’s foremost choral group, the Elmer Iseler Singers, conducted by their artistic director Lydia Adams, a native of Glace Bay but now based in Ontario.