Pratiwi Sudarmono

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Pratiwi Pujilestari Sudarmono (born July 31, 1952 in Sanduko) is an Indonesian scientist and former astronaut candidate. She is currently associate professor 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.

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

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.