Dr. Harris stepped out of the space shuttle Discovery in orbit on February 9, 1995, shattering expectations for the brothers of Kappa Alpha Psi. This auspicious landmark for Black America had been a goal for Dr. Ben since he was a kid. He told the Houston Chronicle, “I also remember, I think it was in the beginning of high school, writing a letter to NASA and saying, ‘I would like to be an astronaut, what do I need to do?’ And so they sent back this list of requirements. One of them was to have an advanced degree in a STEM field. So I started looking at careers that could lead me to NASA. One of those was aerospace engineering, and the other one was medicine. And the medicine stuck.” He pushed past exhaustion and earned a Bachelor of Science degree in biology from the University of Houston and a doctorate in medicine from Texas Tech. Dr. Ben completed his residency at the Mayo Clinic in 1985 and was rewarded with training as a flight surgeon at the Aerospace School of Medicine.
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