It’s Monday, Sept. 23, in downtown Austin, Texas. This is Maggie Kelly, your Inside UATX editor.
Assistant Professor of Bioastronautics Eliah Overbey, my colleague in the office across the hall, is connecting UATX to the Second Space Age.
Dr. Overbey analyzes astronaut specimens to understand how the human body changes during spaceflight, leads the largest-ever collection of space biology data (more on that below)—and teaches Quantitative Reasoning twice a week to 16 UATX freshmen.
She also just founded the UATX Astronautics Club, which she described as “singularly focused on developing the types of people, research, and technology needed to propel humans to the status of multi-planetary species.”
Elon Musk predicted humans will land on Mars by 2028. Overbey’s expectations are slightly more modest.
“I’d put money on sending crews to Mars within my lifetime,” she told me.
Introducing Dr. Eliah Overbey
As a postdoctoral associate in her former position at Weill Cornell Medicine, Eliah Overbey began and led a project with Professor of Genomics, Physiology, & Biophysics Chris Mason called the Space Omics and Medical Atlas (SOMA) to better catalog and understand the changes the human body undergoes during spaceflight.
Their work focused on omics changes—alterations in gene expression, protein profiles, microbiome, metabolomics, and other measures obtained from collecting and analyzing blood, urine, saliva, stool, skin swabs, and skin biopsies from astronauts.
On June 11, Overbey and her coauthors published the SOMA and related papers in the journal Nature. An editor’s introduction described the project as “the largest-ever compendium of data for aerospace medicine and space biology.”
That data included a longitudinal analysis of samples collected from the Inspiration4 spaceflight mission, the first all-civilian trip to a high-altitude orbit. Overbey led sample collection from Inspiration4, directed various biological sequencing assays, and led a multi-institutional team of over 100 researchers to produce the largest astronaut omics dataset to date.
Inspiration4 “demonstrated that a diverse civilian crew can conduct scientific experiments, process samples, and significantly contribute to spaceflight research with minimal risk,” according to one of the papers Overbey and her co-authors published in Nature. “Most metrics (for example, IJV size, heart rate, complete blood count metrics, gene expression, and cytokines) were either stable or quickly reverted to pre-flight levels (baseline) after landing on Earth.”
Overall, their research indicated that space travel for non-astronauts is safe with minimum training.
Overbey and her multi-institutional team’s findings were profiled in over a dozen major news outlets, including Science, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Reuters, The Associated Press, NPR, and ABC.
Over the past few weeks, Overbey led sample collection and analysis for two additional commercial space missions: the SpaceX Polaris Dawn mission earlier in September and Blue Origin’s eighth human spaceflight in August.
The Blue Origin mission launched from a location close to a small town called Van Horn in West Texas, about an eight-hour drive from Austin. Lab space wasn’t available, so Overbey had to make do.
“I had all my lab equipment in my car,” she said. “I parked outside of a motel room. Some of my equipment was too large to take into the room, so I worked out of my car and ran power cables from the hotel room to my trunk.
“So I had the centrifuge, and I had a hood that would filter air when it went into the workspace so that I was introducing no microbial contamination to the samples.”
Overbey managed her latest Blue Origin sample collection alone. On future trips, she hopes to bring some help.
“UATX students will have the opportunity to join me on these sample collections in the future,” Overbey said. “They'll also have the opportunity to analyze the data that we're getting from sequencing these samples and participate in the sequencing as well.
“The students have only been at UATX for about two weeks, and they're already approaching me about getting to work with these samples and data sets and figure out how the human body is changing during spaceflight.”
Inside the UATX Astronautics Club
During its first meeting on Sept. 18, Overbey’s Astronautics Club considered projects in astronaut health studies and not-so-far-off plans for Mars colonization. The group read selections from Robert Zubrin’s book The Case for Mars: The Plan to Settle the Red Planet and Why We Must.
Taking notes from Zubrin, students discussed the following:
Where on Mars could a colony conceivably be settled, and how?
What resources are necessary for survival on Mars?
How might Martian colonists begin to develop an economy?
Freshman Ramya Nambala joined the club out of an interest in space exploration and a desire “to contribute something groundbreaking in the field of space tech and bioastronautics,” she said.
“I’ve always been fascinated by the challenge of space as the next frontier for humanity,” said Nambala. “Joining the club felt like a great way to get hands-on experience, collaborate with like-minded people, and push myself to think beyond Earth’s boundaries.
“Professor Overbey’s expertise in the field and interest in coaching us has opened my eyes to how truly high-impact this experience could be.
“I see making humans multi-planetary as essential for our future, particularly in ensuring that we are not reliant on one planet for our survival. And maybe UATX will be the university that propels humanity forward in achieving this dream.”
Want to join a university where your freshman math professor helps send astronauts to the stars?
The University of Austin has opened applications for the Class of 2029, our next cohort of scholars and builders.
And there’s more.
Thanks to the continued generosity of our donors, each student in the Class of 2029 will be awarded a Founders Scholarship covering the full cost of undergraduate tuition for four years.
That’s a value of approximately $130,000.
→Read more in last Friday’s announcement from the Office of Admissions.
→Find more information and FAQs on the UATX Admissions website.
→Check out our recently launched profile on CollegeXpress.
Want to learn more about Overbey’s work at UATX? Check out her introductory video. Plus, take a look at our entire video library featuring UATX professors, students, and more.
Plus, check out recent additions to our Merch Store, including a new T-shirt inspired by Overbey’s missions to the stars.
Maggie Kelly is the Communications Manager at the University of Austin. Write to her at mkelly@uaustin.org.
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