Be it a faded sorority sweatshirt or a banged-up red bottle opening keychain with a University of Wisconsin logo, most graduates keep small mementos of their undergraduate years in Madison years after leaving campus.

Laurel B. Clark is no different — except she’s taking hers into space.

Clark, a former UW zoology student, is boarding the Space Shuttle Columbia July 19, and has said she will have a Wisconsin-made teddy bear in tow. The token of her college days is dressed in a fake leather jacket with the College of Letters and Science logo embroidered on the front.

She will also take a medallion from her subsequent time in medical school at UW.

Clark’s 16 days aboard the Columbia will be spent studying microgravity through a series of more than 80 experiments aimed at drawing conclusions about human cell and microbe functions. She and the six other crewmembers, including the first Israeli astronaut, will work 24 hours a day in two alternating shifts, according to NASA. This schedule will allow them to experiment with astronaut health and keep ongoing records of both Earth and space sciences.

The Iowa native now considers Wisconsin her home; after completing her undergraduate (’83) studies and graduate work (’87), Clark moved to Racine, Wis.

Clark is more than a token Midwesterner for the crew of the mission, designated officially STS-107. She is the crew’s payload specialist for the mission, which NASA said in a release will “be dedicated to a mixed complement of competitively selected and commercially sponsored research” in space and life sciences.