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When Miss Universe Ireland Fionnghuala O’Reilly struts her stuff at the annual Miss Universe pageant on Sunday, she’ll be using her platform for more than just a night of glitz and glamour.

O’Reilly, 26, may be a beauty queen, but she’s got the brains to back it up, and has set herself apart from her fellow competitors by establishing quite an impressive day job: she works for NASA.

O’Reilly, who goes by Fig, is a member of NASA’s Datanaut program within the space agency’s Open Innovation program, and also works remotely out of Dublin as the executive director of the NASA Space Apps Challenge, which hosts an international hackathon each year.
“Genuinely, I thought it was something that you have to be a genius to do,” she tells PEOPLE of securing her Datanauts gig in January 2018. “I’d never seen anyone that looks like me doing a job like this, and if there were people that looked like me doing a job like this, you didn’t see it often.”