Join Pitt alumni, parents and friends of the University for an evening of connection while you expand your

network and explore how Pitt’s groundbreaking innovations are shaping the future.

Space as a Laboratory for Life 

Tuesday, June 2

6 p.m. Reception

7 p.m. Program

Dessert reception to follow

The Dalcy
302 N Green Street

3rd Floor
Chicago, IL 60607

Kate Rubins, PhD

Director, Trivedi Institute for Space and Global Biomedicine

Professor, Computational and Systems Biology

University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine

and

Retired NASA Astronaut

From sequencing DNA on the International Space Station to conducting field research during disease outbreaks in Central Africa, Dr. Rubins has spent her career working at the edge of what medicine can do in the most extreme environments on Earth, and off it. In this talk, she explores what spaceflight reveals about human biology, why the constraints of orbit turn out to be the same constraints as rural and low-resource settings worldwide, and how the Trivedi Institute for Space and Global Biomedicine at the University of Pittsburgh is turning space science into medicine on the ground.

About the Speaker

Dr. Kate Rubins is a former NASA astronaut, scientist, professor of Computational and Systems Biology and founding director of the Trivedi Institute for Space and Global Biomedicine at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. She was the first person to sequence DNA in space. She earned a PhD from Stanford University and previously led a research laboratory at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research focused on genomics and viral diseases.

Selected as a NASA astronaut in 2009, she led the development of spaceflight hardware and techniques for studying molecular and cellular biology in microgravity and contributed to the design and testing of NASA’s next-generation lunar spacesuits. She has completed two long-duration missions, four spacewalks and spent 300 days aboard the International Space Station. Her current work bridges space exploration and global health, with a focus on genomics, synthetic biology and biomedical innovation.