Pauline Beery Mack retired from a chemistry deanship at 70 to become NASA's ground-based bone-density research director

Pauline Beery Mack (1891–1974) spent her first career as a chemist and, from 1952 to 1962, as dean of Texas Woman's University's College of Household Arts and Sciences. Rather than retiring from research when she left administration at 70, she became a NASA-funded research director. NASA selected her in 1962 to run bed-rest studies on healthy men — in the framing of her institutional biography, "to evaluate the effects of inactivity on bone mass" — using X-ray bone-densitometry equipment she had designed herself. In 1970 she became the first woman awarded NASA's Silver Snoopy award, presented by Apollo 13 commander Jim Lovell.

Mack's program was the ground-based answer to the in-flight skeletal-loss concern flagged in claim-gemini-nutrition-report-embeds-a-bone-demineralization-concern: if astronauts might be demineralizing in orbit, how does one study that on Earth? Her method — prolonged bed rest as a stand-in for microgravity — became and remains the field's standard analog, treated separately in claim-head-down-bed-rest-is-the-standard-ground-analog-for-spaceflight-bone-loss.

The biographical facts here rest on a Tier 3 institutional page corroborated by Tier 4 Wikipedia; they are uncontested but not primary-sourced, which is why this note stays a seedling. The dates, the self-designed instrumentation, and the Silver Snoopy priority would each firm up against an archival or obituary record.