Megan was selected as one of sixty students from universities across the country to complete a NASA internship last fall at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas. During the internship, Megan carried out a study to determine the effects of processing on astronaut blood samples and their measured nutritional status. As part of her internship, funded by the Oregon Space Grant, Megan also toured flight control rooms and astronaut training facilities, including mock-ups of the Space Shuttle and International Space Station modules. She experienced one aspect of astronaut training firsthand when she completed a run on the Space Shuttle Motion Base Simulator which allows astronauts to practice launch and landing procedures in an environment that approximates the look and feel of a Shuttle flight. She had the following to say about her internship experience:
”Ever since I went to space camp as a little kid, I’ve always been captivated by space flight. This internship gave me the opportunity not only to carry out research, but also to gain a better understanding of the role of the medical field in human space flight. We have so much yet to learn about how the human body will react to long-duration space flight, and this knowledge will only become increasingly more critical as NASA plans to send humans to Mars and beyond in the next few decades,”
Megan also completed an OSU Howard Hughes Medical Institute Summer Undergraduate Research Program project working with Dr. Francis Chan in Zoology this last summer. Her work examined the role of planktonic respiration in the hypoxic "dead zones" off the coast of Oregon.
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