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@ncstate NC State’s Engineering Building II is now Christina Hammock Koch Hall. Located on the Oval on Centennial Campus, Koch Hall is home of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and the Department of Computer Science. Koch earned three degrees during her five years at NC State — a B.S. in electrical engineering, a B.S. in physics and an M.S. in electrical engineering. “Today, students are hard at work in these buildings all around us. Each of them, chasing their dream. We may not know them all by name just yet. However, they will know the name of Christina Koch. Her light will shine for them, like a beacon,” Chancellor Howell said at today’s welcome home celebration as he announced the building’s new name. Since becoming a NASA astronaut in 2013, Koch set a record for the longest single spaceflight by a woman with a total of 328 days in space and participated in the first all-female spacewalk. In April 2026, she served as mission specialist of NASA’s Artemis II mission and flew farther from Earth than anyone in human history. “328 days in orbit, and nearly 700,000 miles around the moon did not begin at a launch pad,” Koch said. “They began on Stinson Drive — me, unconventional, quiet but with loud hair, and wondering if I belonged. Students of every kind, walking by and into this building, are my why.”
