🇺🇸Emily
Calandrelli

Growing up in Morgantown, West Virginia, Emily Calandrelli did not see scientists who looked like her on television. The women she admired were not in lab coats — they were in other fields, other stories. That absence, she has said, nearly cost her a career in science. She almost talked herself out of engineering before she started. Then she got to West Virginia University, walked into a mechanical and aerospace engineering program, and discovered she was actually very good at it. What she did with that discovery — the decade-long project of making herself the visible scientist she had not had — is the thing that makes her remarkable.

Calandrelli graduated from West Virginia University with a degree in mechanical and aerospace engineering, then moved to Cambridge to pursue not one but two master's degrees at MIT — one in aeronautics and astronautics, one in technology and policy. MIT's graduate programs in these fields are among the most selective on the planet; admission requires both exceptional technical skill and the capacity to think rigorously about the systems around engineering decisions: regulatory, economic, political. Calandrelli excelled in both dimensions. She emerged from MIT in 2013 with the credentials of a research scientist and the broader perspective of someone trained to think about why and for whom the technology is built.

Rather than a traditional research track, she turned to communication. She joined Xploration Station as a host and co-executive producer of "Xploration Outer Space," a science television series distributed to 95 percent of the United States in syndication, explaining orbital mechanics, space habitation, and the future of human spaceflight to a general audience. The show ran for multiple seasons and was nominated for a Daytime Emmy Award — a measure of reach that most working aerospace engineers never approach. Her on-screen presence was notable for its clarity and enthusiasm: she explained complex physics without condescension, and she was visibly delighted by the material.

In 2020, she brought that approach to Netflix with "Emily's Wonder Lab," a hands-on science show for children featuring experiments that families could replicate at home. The show aired during the first year of the pandemic, when millions of children were isolated from schools and laboratories and desperately in need of structured scientific engagement. Emily's Wonder Lab filled that gap in a format both entertaining and technically sound — a combination that is harder to achieve than it sounds. The series was produced with the same care for accuracy that characterized her TV work, and it reached a global audience that Xploration Outer Space, limited to U.S. distribution, had not.

Parallel to her television career, Calandrelli wrote a children's book series. The "Ada Lace" books — named for Ada Lovelace, the nineteenth-century mathematician considered the first computer programmer — follow a ten-year-old girl who solves problems using science, technology, engineering, and math. The series has sold hundreds of thousands of copies and won multiple awards for children's literature in the STEM category. Ada Lace is not a fairy tale protagonist; she is a methodical thinker who approaches the world empirically, and the books model scientific curiosity without making it seem either effortless or inaccessible. Calandrelli has said that she wrote the character she wished she had read as a child in West Virginia.

On social media, where she is known as "The Space Gal," Calandrelli has built a following in the millions, sharing space news, scientific explainers, and the reality of being a working mother with an engineering background. She was named to Forbes' 30 Under 30 list in science. She has spoken at the United Nations, testified before Congressional committees on STEM education, and worked with multiple space agencies and aerospace corporations as an advocate and advisor. What she built is not a single invention or a single discovery — it is an ongoing architecture of visibility, constructed across television, books, and social media, designed to ensure that the next girl in Morgantown can see exactly what a scientist looks like.