Auñón-Chancellor named McGovern Distinguished Alumna
The McGovern Medical School Alumni Association and the Office of Alumni Engagement have named Serena Auñón-Chancellor, MD ’01, MPH, as the 2025 recipient of the Distinguished Alumni Award.
Auñón-Chancellor is a clinical professor in the Aerospace Medicine program at Texas A&M University Naresh K. Vashisht College of Medicine.
After graduation from McGovern Medical School, Auñón-Chancellor completed an internal medicine residency at The University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston, including a year as chief resident in the Department of Internal Medicine. After that, she finished an aerospace medicine residency and a Master of Public Health at UTMB in 2007.
In 2009, Auñón-Chancellor was selected to the 20th NASA astronaut class, just three years after joining Johnson Space Center as a flight surgeon. On June 6, 2018, Auñón-Chancellor strapped into the Soyuz spacecraft and blasted off to space for 197 days on the International Space Station as a member of Expedition 56 and 57.
The Distinguished Alumni Award is the latest in a long list of honors for Auñón-Chancellor, including the George Washington University Bicentennial Monumental Alumna Award from her alma mater in 2021. In 2022, the Aerospace Medical Association granted her the Joe Kerwin Award for advancing understanding of human physiology in spaceflight and innovating in the practice of space medicine to support optimal human health and performance in space.
In 2018, she was awarded both the Distinguished Service Medal and the Space Flight Medal from NASA in recognition of her distinguished contribution as a flight engineer and for crewmember participation toward the success of Expedition 56 and 57.
Auñón-Chancellor continues to remain active in the space industry, serving as an expert member of the Virgin Galactic Medical Advisory Board, the Axiom Medical Advisory Board, and the Star Harbor Medical Advisory Board.
The Alumni Association also named Sean O’Leary, MD, ’96, MPH, a 2025 Distinguished Alumnus Award Recipient. However he will defer his honor until 2027.