Judith Arlene Resnik was an American electrical engineer, software engineer, biomedical engineer, pilot and NASA astronaut who died aboard the Space Shuttle Challenger when it was destroyed during the launch of mission STS-51-L. Resnik was the second American woman in space and the fourth woman in space worldwide, logging 145 hours in orbit. She was the first Jewish woman of any nationality in space. The IEEE Judith Resnik Award for space engineering is named in her honor.
Judith Resnik was accepted at Carnegie Mellon after being 1 of only 16 women in the history of the United States to have attained a perfect score on the SAT exam at the time. She went on to graduate with a degree in electrical engineering from Carnegie Mellon before attaining a Ph.D. in electrical engineering from the University of Maryland. Recognized while still a child for her "intellectual brilliance," Resnik went on to work for RCA as an engineer on Navy missile and radar projects, was a senior systems engineer for Xerox Corporation and published research on special-purpose integrated circuitry before she was recruited by NASA to the astronaut program as a mission specialist at age 28.