Cowings was born and raised in
The Bronx,
New York City on December 15, 1948. She is the only daughter of Sadie B. and Albert S. Cowings. Sadie was an assistant preschool teacher and Albert was a grocery store owner. She had three other brothers who went on to become a two-star army general, a jazz musician, and a freelance journalist. Her parents emphasized education as a "way of getting out of the Bronx." Cowings is most well known for developing methods to combat space sickness for astronauts in space. She began working at NASA in 1971, when she was a graduate student and received a fellowship in the Graduate Research Science Program. In 1973, she graduated from the University of California, Davis, with a psychology degree. Although Cowings never made it to space, she became the first African American woman scientist to be trained as an astronaut by NASA in 1979. Even though she never went to space, she still spent 34 years researching the effects of gravity on human physiology^1. Cowings invention of a program, called the autogenic-feedback training exercise, would be tested in astronauts for the first time on the STS-51B and STS-51C shuttle flights in 1985^3. Her program was successful and she also developed an instrument that could easily monitor astronauts’ physiological responses in space^3. ==Education==