Pratiwi Sudarmono


Pratiwi Pujilestari Sudarmono is an Indonesian scientist. She is currently professor of microbiology at the University of Indonesia, Jakarta.
Pratiwi Sudarmono received a master's degree from the University of Indonesia in 1977, and the Ph.D. in Molecular Biology from the University of Osaka, Japan, in 1984. She then started her scientific career as WHO grantee researching the molecular biology of Salmonella typhi. From 1994 to 2000, she was head of the Department of Microbiology of the Medical Faculty of the University of Indonesia. From 2001 to 2002, she was a scholar in the Fulbright New Century Scholars Program.

Space Shuttle Mission STS-61-H

In October 1985, she was selected to take part in the NASA Space Shuttle mission STS-61-H as a Payload Specialist. Taufik Akbar was her backup on the mission. However, after the Challenger disaster the deployment of commercial satellites like the Indonesian Palapa B-3 planned for the STS-61-H mission was canceled, thus the mission never took place. The satellite was later launched with a Delta rocket.