Dr. Valerie Thomas is a physicist, data scientist, inventor, and educational leader. She demonstrated an interest in science and electronics from a young age. Although her father recommended that she should just stick to "girly things", she did not let this discourage her. In high school she learned more about physics and began to answer the question of 'what makes things tick?'. After completing high school, she attended Morgan State College, where she earned a physics degree. She then took a job at NASA helping to lay the foundation for image processing for NASA's Landsat program.
The Landsat program is NASA's longest-running mission dedicated to taking high-quality images of the Earth, to study the impacts of land usage and other human/nature-caused changes on land. She also invented the Illusion Transmitter, a setup of mirrors and cameras that capture an image and transmit it to a different location.