Daniela has degrees in Biotech Engineering, Genomics, and Bioinformatics at Cornell, Max Planck , EMBL/CRG with publications in Cell, Science, Nature. Besides co-authoring more than 17 space biology-related papers she is co-chair of NASA GeneLabs Microbiome , ISSOP and ESA Space Omics. She was among the top 4% ESA astronaut candidates, co-founded Poppy Health, was CSO at Bumrungrad hospital and is now leading yuri’s transition to a biotech company.

Christopher Mason is a professor of Genomics, Physiology and Biophysics at Weill Cornell Medicine New York. Chris has published over 275 publications in journals like Cell, Science, Nature and has been cited almost 30,000 times. He and his team completed the first-ever sequencing of DNA on the ISS. Among other awards, he won the “Brilliant Ten” scientist of Popular Science. And if you want to know what he is really up to, check out his great book “The Next 500 years”.

Stefan Oschmann started his career in pharma occupying diverse managing positions at MSD. He then worked at Merck, starting by leading the Healthcare department and developing the global strategy to become CEO of Merck in 2016. With his award-winning leadership skills he served Merck until 2021. Currently, Stefan works as chairman at both UCB and AiCuris Anti-infective Cures.

Jessica studied chemistry at the Free University of Berlin and completed her PhD in biochemistry in a research group at the Charité Berlin on “Proteome analysis of human thyroid cells cultured under simulated microgravity”. She participated in several scientific space experiments (SIMBOX on ShenZhou-8, Cellbox-1 and SPHEROIDS on ISS).

Afshin has a PhD from Florida State in physics and made a transition to cancer, systems biology, space biology, and radiation biology. As Assistant Professor at Tufts University he worked in the areas of cancer incl. microRNAs, aging and novel immunotherapies. He holds positions at NASA Ames, Nasa Genelabs and Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard where he works on microRNAs and mitochondria in space, COVID-19 and the impact of high altitude on human biology.

Richard holds a PhD from the University of Nottingham and has over 10 years of experience as a NASA funded space biology researcher with 6 ISS experiments under his belt. As part of being co-chair of the NASA Genelabs Plant Analysis he provides access to space biology data. He was a selected representative of the American Academy of Science at the Future Leaders in Space Science and won the Thora Halstead award.