JAM Fund alumna Christina Birch is now an astronaut.

NASA announced 10 new astronaut candidates, among them, Birch, who is 35 years old and ready to fly. According to the space organization’s press release, this is the first new class of astronauts in four years. More than 12,000 people applied to the program.

Birch got her cyclocross roots racing with the JAM Fund from 2011 to 2015 before becoming a pro track cyclist and 11-time U.S. Track National Champion. During her cycling career, she also won two gold medals at the Pan American Games and a spot on the 2021 Tokyo Olympic long team. Now, Birch is a NASA astronaut and is poised to be one of the first Americans to go back to the moon in more than 50 years.

“There’s really no one path to becoming a NASA astronaut,” she said at the NASA announcement on December 6, 2021. “You might think that my path as a bio engineer and a cyclist is a little bit out there, but it was really all of those skills that I gained from those experiences that helped me get here.”

Birch graduated from the University of Arizona with bachelor’s degrees in mathematics, biochemistry and molecular biophysics. She earned her doctorate in biological engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

She will start her new career in January and will begin with two years of initial training, after which she could be assigned to missions into deep space and to the moon.