Houston, Texas. May 9, 2024 -- The Translational Research Institute for Space Health at Baylor College of Medicine with consortium partners California Institute of Technology and Massachusetts Institute of Technology announced today its first selection for the Space Health Ingress Program solicitation.
The selected project, titled “Future Foods for Space: Mobilizing the Future Foods Community to Accelerate Advances in Space Health,” is led by Dr. Denneal Jamison-McClung at the University of California, Davis. This project seeks advancements in space food systems that yield efficient, nutritious meals to sustain long-term space exploration and habitation. Jamison-McClung and her team aim to strengthen and reinvigorate the food-related space health research community by broadly mobilizing academic and food industry researchers who have not previously engaged in space exploration.
The maturation of future foods is designed to address the most pressing challenges faced by both the food industry and astronauts in space. The UC Davis team aims to facilitate the development of novel and sustainable food products and ingredients, as well as their production methods, storage and delivery.
The team will receive $1 million over two years from the SHIP solicitation, which seeks to engage and train first-time NASA investigators, thereby bolstering the space biomedical research community.
“We are eager to see the inventive ideas Dr. Jamison-McClung’s team will bring into the space health community,” said Catherine Domingo, TRISH research operations manager. “We are thrilled to grow the food-related space health community and provide future investigators with mentorship and the tools to address the constraints and opportunities of human space exploration.”
“As we look to enable safer space exploration and habitation for humans, it is clear that food and nutrition are foundational,” said Dr. Asha S. Collins, chair of the SHIP advisory board. “We’re excited to see how accelerating innovation in food science for space health could also result in food-related innovations for people on Earth in remote areas and food deserts.”
TRISH is an applied space health research catalyst empowered by the NASA Human Research Program to solve the challenges of human deep space exploration. Led by Baylor College of Medicine's Center for Space Medicine, the consortium leverages partnerships with Caltech and MIT.
