Making India proud: Shawna Pandya to become third Indian-origin woman to travel to space!

New Delhi: As a child, she loved space and she loved the stars. Today, she's become the third Indian-origin woman, after Kalpana Chawla and Sunita Williams, to go to space.

32-year-old Shawna Pandya, who is a neurologist by profession, is all set to be a part of an eight-member crew of an expedition in 2018.

Pandya will be conducting experiments with bio-science and medical science, as well as studying the effects of microgravity on health and physiology in space. She will also study climate change as a part of the Polar Suborbital Science in the Upper Mesosphere (PoSSUM) project.

The Mumbai-born Canadian doctor is one of the two candidates shortlisted from 3,200 people in the Citizen Science Astronaut program.

Apart from being a medical professional, the multi-talented woman is also a competitive taekwondo athlete, an opera singer, an author, has even learnt Muay Thai from a Navy SEAL and is fluent in French, Spanish and Russian! And if all this wasn't enough, she is also an integral part of the team preparing to undertake a 100-day underwater mission called Project Poseidon, at the Aquarius Space Research Facility in Florida.

According to a report in the Indian Express, she is also a Silicon Valley entrepreneur and has even walked the runway as a model.

Now that's what we call an overachiever!

"All my junior high science projects or reports, they were all space related ... I think the idea of doing something that's so adventurous and really pushes the bounds of exploration, and the fact that you'd get to space really, really resonated with me," Pandya told CBS, the Huffington Post reported.