IN BARNLIKE BUILDINGS on an acre of land among alfalfa fields and cattle, dedicated UC Davis scientists have studied gravitational biology for more than five decades.
These unassuming buildings house what may be the largest centrifuge lab in the world, part of the Chronic Acceleration Unit, or CARU. A few years before men landed on the moon in 1969, faculty and students conducted experiments on hypergravity there, assessing how astronauts’ bodies could be affected by long-term spaceflight, take-offs and landings, and how their lives and health could be improved. That work continues today.
NASA has invested millions of dollars in UC Davis research, working with UC Davis biologists, engineers, physiologists, psychologists and other researchers to study life in space — whether that be studying space itself, the effects of gravity, getting there, staying there or surviving there.
Astronaut Stephen K. Robinson, STS-114 mission specialist, anchored to a foot restraint on the extended International Space Station’s Canadarm2, participates in the mission's third session of extravehicular activity. The blackness of space and Earth’s horizon form the backdrop for the image. Photo taken Aug. 3, 2005. Robinson is a UC Davis graduate who returned to teach in 2012. He now serves as chair of the UC Davis Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering. He flew on four space shuttle missions. (Photo/NASA)
Among the hundreds of UC Davis graduates who have gone on from UC Davis labs to careers in the space industry is Liz Warren. She was a junior in high school when she began to think seriously about her future education and career. She was equally comfortable on a nature hike — fascinated by every leaf, flower and bug — as she was in a lab with a microscope.
But she was also intrigued by flight (her father worked for a national airline) in the space travel that was ever-present on television and in everyday life growing up in the ’80s and ’90s.
“I was born with insatiable curiosity about so many things,” she said. “I thought at some point I was going to have to make a choice between rockets and space — and biology.”
She did not have to make that choice.
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