Stofan has been involved in all manner of exciting projects, such as figuring out how to put humans on Mars, but she's most proud of introducing a system whereby NASA collects voluntary demographic data on all grant proposals. "Implicit or unconscious bias is all around us; we may act on deep-seated biases that we don't even know we have. The first step in dealing with bias is seeing if you have a problem, and that is what the data collection will tell us," she said.

According to Space.com, NASA has yet to come up with any formal succession plan. But, whoever ends up taking the top scientician spot, hopefully they share Stofan's drive to find "definitive evidence" of extraterrestrial life within the next decade or two.