The space age woman

Sharmila Bhattacharya

Soon or later we have to leave this planet and make our home somewhere else. But it won’t be easy. If and when we leave this planet though one Indian woman would have contributed a lot to how humans fare in space. The science that deals with the development of medical technology, biotech research, and healthcare methodologies for astronauts is called Astrobionics. And the foremost researcher in that field is Sharmila Bhattacharya, Space Biologist and head of the Biomodel Performance and Behavior Laboratory at NASA’s Ames Research Center. Sharmila has a bachelor’s degree in Biological chemistry from Wellesley College in Massachusetts. After working as an undergraduate research assistant at Princeton University, Sharmila went on to get a Masters and a PhD in Molecular Biology from Princeton. Before being hired as a payload scientist by Lockheed Martin to work at the Ames Center she also did her post-doctoral research at Stanford in Neurobiology. Since then she has been promoted to be a chief scientist for Astrobionics, and heads the laboratory, leading cutting edge research.