Carolyn Leach Huntoon (born August 25, 1940) is an American scientist and former government official. She was the director of the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, a position which she held from 1994 to 1996, and was the first woman in the role. She was an assistant secretary at the Department of Energy from 1999 to 2001.
Carolyn Leach was born in Leesville, Louisiana, on August 25, 1940.[1] She had four sisters, Frances, Mixon Lee, Gloria Hope and Martha Ann, and an older brother, Anthony Claude (Buddy) Leach Jr.,[2] who served a term in the United States House of Representatives representing Louisiana's 4th congressional district from 1979 to 1981.[3] She was educated at Leesville High School, from which she graduated with the class of 1958.[4]
She entered Northwestern State College in Natchitoches, Louisiana, in September of that year. She graduated with a Bachelor of Science (BS) degree in August 1962, and qualified as a medical technologist at Ochsner Foundation Hospital. She attended the University of Texas at Houston for a year in 1963 and 1964, and then Baylor College of Medicine, where she earned her Master of Science (MS) in 1966, and PhD in 1968.[1] As part of her master's thesis, Leach studied aldosterone, a salt-retaining hormone produced by the adrenal gland. This was of particular interest to the National Air and Space Administration (NASA) because astronauts suffered from imbalances of fluids and electrolytes during spaceflight. After she completed her doctorate at Baylor on the control of the stress reaction in animals, she accepted a National Research Council postdoctoral fellowship to study the metabolism of returning space flight crews at NASA's Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston, Texas.[5]
She joined NASA in 1970,[6] and as head of the Endocrine Laboratory, which was then part of the Lunar Receiving Laboratory, performed pre- and post-flight testing of astronauts on the Project Apollo missions. During Project Skylab, some of the experiments she had developed as a postdoctoral researcher were performed on the space station.[5] She married Harrison Hibbert Huntoon; they had a daughter named Sally Ann.[1][2]
In 1974, Huntoon became head of the Endocrine and Biochemistry Laboratories at the Johnson Space Center,[1] as the Manned Spaceflight Center had been renamed in 1973.[7] She became the chief of the Biomedical Laboratories Branch in 1977. She was a consultant to the US Navy for the Tektite habitat project in 1969 and 1970, the McGovern Allergy Clinic in Houston from 1972 to 1975, the Department of Physiology at Washington State University in Pullman, Washington, from 1974 to 1976, and the American Society of Clinical Pathologists in Chicago from 1974 to 1978. She was also an adjunct professor at the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston from 1975 to 1987.[1]
Huntoon was appointed to the selection panel for NASA Astronaut Group 8, the first astronaut selection that included women.[5] The selection of six women as astronauts in 1978 doubled the number of women in technical positions at the Johnson Space Center. As the most senior woman already there, Huntoon became a role model and chaperone to the newcomers. She was involved in the center's preparations to cater for women as astronauts and became the point of contact for those with issues with the women astronauts.[8] She went on to serve on subsequent astronaut selection panels until 1994,[1] but expressed regret that fewer women were chosen than she would have liked, the Astronaut Office remaining largely male-dominated into the 21st century.[5]