Cowings, Patricia

By: Sara L. Thompson

Source:

 Black Women in America, Second Edition

Cowings, Patricia

(b. 15 December 1948),
scientist.

As the longtime director of psychophysiological research at NASA, Ames Research Center (ARC), in Mountain View, California, Patricia Cowings's career as a research psychologist at NASA has spanned well over three decades. Beginning with a focus on training astronauts to use biofeedback to overcome the motion sickness that plagues them during their flights, she developed the Autogenic Feedback Training Exercise (AFTE). Using this system, an astronaut learns to control functions previously considered to be involuntary, such as heart rate, the temperature of the extremities, and the muscles of the digestive system. Such a technique is invaluable to astronauts and pilots who are placed in extreme conditions and emergency flight situations and need to control their own “fight or flight” responses to think clearly and act effectively.

Cowings was born in New York City and spent her childhood in the Fort Apache area of the Bronx where her parents, Albert S. and Sadie B. Cowings, owned a grocery store. Her mother went back to school after her children were grown and became a kindergarten teacher, and her parents were adamant that education was the way out of the Bronx. Cowings could be found studying in the car parked out in front of the store where her father could keep track of her. Her mother shared with her children her love of reading. Thus, this little girl in the Bronx of the 1950s developed an interest in science fiction.

At nine years old, Cowings realized that the interesting jobs went to men, and specifically white men. Confiding in her father that she appeared to be at the bottom of the barrel, her father told her, “No, no, no. You've got this all wrong. You're not just a short round brown girl from the Bronx. What you are is a human being, and a human being is the best animal on the whole planet.” She received additional inspiration and encouragement when she met her aunt, who had a PhD in Psychology. This was the first woman she knew who had a career other than teaching, and her aunt opened Cowings's mind to the fascinating science of how people learn and think.

Interest in Psychology

After finishing high school at the High School of Music and Art in New York, Cowings went to the State University of New York, Stony Brook, to major in Psychology. While trying to figure out what area of psychology she wanted to study, she took a job in a brain-research laboratory at the university. She was intrigued with the specialized equipment for studying brain waves, and she learned she was good at analyzing data and writing reports. Though she expected to graduate and get a job as an EEG technician, her professor encouraged her to go to graduate school. Thus, after she graduated cum laude from Stony Brook with a BA in Psychology in 1970, she headed west, as far as she could get from the Bronx, and enrolled in the graduate school in psychology at the University of California, Davis.

She earned a reputation there as something of a science-fiction fanatic because of her devotion to the popular science-fiction television program Star Trek. She decided to enroll in a graduate engineering class on space-shuttle technology, in which the students were all men and all engineering students. Not even possessing a bachelor of science degree in engineering, a course prerequisite, Cowings had to argue her way into the course. According to her, the argument she offered to the professor went something like this:

"“You have no women in this class. Everybody's designing zero gravity tables and things like that. Who's going to design the shuttle's curtains? You need a woman. You have no life sciences people in the class. Nobody is looking at what impact that environment could have on animals, such as human beings. You need a life sciences woman in this class.” He bought it."

(Quoted at NASA Quest)

Her instructor, Dr. Hans Mark, who was then director of the ARC at NASA, arranged a field trip for his class to the ARC. It was a life-changing event for Cowings. She knew on that trip she would work for NASA.

Postdoctoral Work at ARC

After graduating from the University of California at Davis in 1973 with an MA and PhD in psychology, Cowings went on to the ARC for postdoctoral work. In 1976 she became the first American woman to receive scientist-astronaut training when she participated as a payload specialist in a simulated life sciences space-shuttle mission conducted by NASA–Ames Research Center and NASA Johnson Space Center. As an alternate, she never got the chance to fly, but the experience was invaluable.

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Cowings developed her Autogenic Feedback Training Exercise, which was included in experiments on Spacelab 3 in 1985. From 1985 to 1988, she collaborated with the U.S. Air Force in the training of payload-specialist candidates in the techniques of AFTE. From 1988 to 1992 she participated in the collaboration between NASA and the Japanese Space Agency, testing the AFTE on Spacelab-J in 1992. (Mae Jemison, the first African American woman astronaut, tested Cowings's system on that flight.)

Her northern upbringing and the self-esteem that had been instilled in her by her family left Cowings unprepared for some of the attitudes she encountered at NASA. She told Dorothy Ehrhart-Morrison about experiencing firsthand actions she had previously seen only on television:

"I'm not talking about anybody burning a cross on my lawn or anything like that—but things like having my experiment removed from the manifest, because I was not considered a “serious” scientist. Some individuals at another space center made concerted efforts to remove me as a principal investigator. They did not, quote, feel that I was the right type to interact with astronauts, unquote. I told them that I was type O-positive. They wanted someone who was taller, masculine, pinker, and older"

(p. 46).

In 1996 Cowings traveled to Russia and trained cosmonauts for their missions in the Russian Mir space station. During the early twenty-first century at NASA, she worked in a collaborative effort with the U.S. Coast Guard and the U.S. Army in the training of pilots flying high-performance military aircraft. In 2003 it was announced that the BioSentient Company, started by Mae Jemison, had received the license to develop AFTE for earthbound applications. The company expects to see AFTE used in the treatment of migraine headaches, anxiety disorders, and blood pressure problems.

In her private life, Cowings has also followed her own mind and heart. She has been married to her lab partner and co-investigator William B. Toscano since 1980. (He was a graduate student in her laboratory at the time of their marriage.) The fact that she married a white man might have bothered some, but she says, “Any objections my family or the universe may have had against a mixed marriage, to heck with that. I'll do what I want to do …. Bill reassures me that my work is important. He understands why I have to do this.” They have one son, Christopher, born in 1987.

See also Jemison, Mae Carol and Science and Technology.

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