I was just thinking it might be nice to point out potential future role models for my kids when I stumbled across a biography of Taylor Wang, the first Chinese-born astronaut.

He's a physicist who studies the way spheroids behave (which is interesting because we live on a spheroid that's orbiting another spheroid, although he seems to study much smaller spheroids, like the ones that come out of aerosol cans).

Born in Nanchang (where a lot of adopted kids come from), raised in Taiwan, then Hong Kong, and finally moved to UCLA to study physics. It was a paper he wrote on rotating spheroids in zero gravity that caught NASA's eye, and he started training for a mission in space. On On April 29, 1985, he went up on Challenger as the first Chinese-born astronaut (besides the mighty ((and probably legendary)) Wan Hu, who never made it back from his pioneering 16th-century rocket trip).

Nowadays, Wang teaches at Vanderbilt University. But, you know, he's been in space!