As a child growing up in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, Renee Horton spent many nights staring at the night sky, wondering what might exist beyond our universe. “My interest in space was stimulated during family trips to Biloxi, Mississippi, to visit my uncle who was in the Air Force,” she describes in one of her blog posts on the NASA website. “We stopped at the rest area outside of Stennis Space Center, where a replica of the moon lander was located, and I played around it, pretending I was exploring space.”
Horton eventually decided she wanted to become an astronaut and joined the Air Force ROTC program when she was 17 and just starting her undergraduate degree at Louisiana State University. Unfortunately, while in this program, Horton discovered that she had a significant hearing impairment and was therefore not eligible to become an astronaut. Feeling discouraged and overwhelmed by this news, Horton dropped out of school. “I struggled with accepting my hearing loss,” she says, “and by not accepting it and owning it, it created a lot of obstacles when I returned to school. I still struggle with my hearing loss.”
When she did return to complete her undergraduate degree, Horton was a mother of three. Her motivation to return to school came after she had her first daughter. “I felt that she deserves somebody who can open doors for her to be able to walk through whatever door she wants,” she said in an interview with Global News last year.
She received her undergraduate degree in Electrical Engineering in 2002 from Louisiana State University. “After completing my undergrad,” she says, “I realized that I still wanted to know more. I not only wanted to know how to use the materials I was creating, I also wanted to know how their molecular structures affected their properties.”
Horton began her PhD studies at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa in 2005. “I bounced around with nanoparticles, quantum dots, and thin films,” she says. Throughout her graduate studies, Horton had the opportunity to work at NASA during the summers through NASA’s Graduate Student Researchers Program and the Harriett G. Jenkins Predoctoral Fellowship Project.
It was those summers at NASA that eventually led to her studying self-reacting friction stir welding—an innovative welding process that is used to create very high-quality and high-strength welds in aluminum alloys in the space exploration sector. Horton completed her PhD in 2011, becoming the first ever African American to receive a PhD degree in material science with a concentration in physics from the University. Her thesis was entitled Microhardness, strength, and strain field characterization of self-reacting friction stir and plug welds of dissimilar aluminum alloys.