2020 Student Winners
ASGSR is pleased to announce the winners of the Undergraduate and Graduate student lightning talk competition from the 2020 virtual conference November 5-6 .
Graduate Student Award winners:
• 1st Place: Marta Cortesão, DLR German Aerospace Agency and Georg August University of Göttingen, “Microbial survival to Mars-like conditions: the MARSBOx stratospheric balloon mission”;
• 2nd Place: MC Dorbecker, University of Colorado, “Modeling crew performance degradation due to radiation exposure in space”;
• 3rd Place: Karthekeyan Sridhar, Auburn University,“Investigating Vapor Mobility from a Sawtooth-Microstructured Surface for Suppressed Buoyancy Conditions.”
Undergraduate Student Award winners:
• 1st Place: Melanie Gucwa, Carthage College, “Use of the TOAST bioinformatics database to identify genes in Arabidopsis thaliana that may be important in the gravitropic response during spaceflight”
• 2nd Place Tie: Simon Ng, UCLA/SLSTP NASA Ames, “Engineering thermostable carbonic anhydrases for spacecraft CO2 removal using machine learning” ;
• 2nd Place Tie: Rachel Tucker, University of Florida/KSC SPROUTS, “Martian Regolith as a Substrate for Foreign Planetary Horticulture: Germination and Early Seedling Development of Six Cultivars in Mars Global Simulant-1 (MGS-1).”
Marta Cortesão, DLR German Aerospace Agency and Georg August University of Göttingen also won the prestigious Tom K. Scott Student award. This award is in honor of Dr. Tom K. Scott to a student attending the ASGSR meeting with excellent academic and/or professional achievements, and an outstanding potential for success in, and interest in the field of gravitational and space research. This award both recognizes students for their past accomplishments as well as encourages further excellence in the field.
The ISS-National Lab announced the following winners in their physical sciences and life sciences competition: .
•Physical Science: Evan Baker (PhD student at Tufts University), “Co-Si Solidification Under Variable Stirring Conditions: Insights from Synchrotron XRD”
• Life Science: Apurva Raghu, Pali Keppetipola, Debbie Adam, Niki Gooya, Michelle Fang (University of Maryland undergraduate students), “E. coli Biofilm Formation and Growth on Porous and Nonporous Aluminum Surfaces on the ISS.”
ASGSR would like to thank all of the students for their hard work on the presentations and all of the judges who volunteered to help make this such a successfulcompetition!