Abstract: Human spaceflight is incredibly complex, and future missions will become more and more challenging. Long-duration space flight presents many challenges to the human body. Most every physiological, psychological, and cognitive system is affected in some way. Even though NASA has rigorous plans in place to address these concerns, as missions become longer and more ambitious the ability to identify and mitigate the major issues related to health and performance will be greatly taxed. Part of this challenge encompasses the multi-disciplinary nature of the interactions within the body, between crewmembers, and between the crew and the larger mission (spacecraft, mission control, mission goals). There is thus the need for a systems approach to health and performance. It will not be sufficient on longer and more ambitious missions simply to ensure that things do not go wrong (risk mitigation); it will also be necessary to provide the tools (tangible and intangible) for the crew and the mission to be resilient – to deal with the unexpected. This takes on increased importance when one recognizes that crews on distant missions will be largely autonomous and independent from Earth. This talk presents an overview of the main biomedical concerns as we now understand them, and makes the case for a new approach that considers not only cross-system interactions but also how to design resilience into a mission, so that crews can deal with the unexpected. Approaches to this problem can be drawn from the fields of resilience engineering, complex systems, and complex networks.
Bio: Mark Shelhamer is on the faculty of Johns Hopkins University where he started as a postdoctoral fellow in 1990. He has bachelor’s and master’s degrees in electrical engineering from Drexel University, and a doctoral degree in biomedical engineering from MIT. At MIT he worked on sensorimotor physiology and modeling, including the study of astronaut adaptation to space flight. He then moved to Johns Hopkins where he continued the study of sensorimotor adaptation with an emphasis on the vestibular and oculomotor systems and nonlinear dynamics. From 2013 to 2016 he served as Chief Scientist for the NASA Human Research Program at the Johnson Space Center. In that role, he oversaw NASA’s research portfolio for maintaining health and performance in long-duration spaceflight. This portfolio spans a range from physiology to psychology, including planning of medical systems and effects of radiation. Since returning to Johns Hopkins, his research has continued in the area of sensorimotor function, which includes experiments on ISS astronauts as well as crews of commercial orbital space flights. He also has a research program devoted to the multi-system and cross-disciplinary interactions that contribute to personal and mission resilience in spaceflight.
Website: https://profiles.hopkinsmedicine.org/provider/mark-j-shelhamer/2777908
Host: Gretar Tryggvason