Padside

Rob Ferl

BO · American · Private · Occasional Spaceflight

Career record

Flights
1
Launches with a definitive outcome — the Stats basis
Career time in space
10m
Career EVA time
under a minute
Spacewalks
0

Biography

Rob is a distinguished professor and director of the Astraeus Space Institute at the University of Florida. He has spent his career studying how living organisms respond to extreme conditions, especially microgravity. He and his colleagues have worked with NASA astronauts to conduct numerous experiments on the International Space Station that have shown that plants turn certain genes on and off in response to changes in gravity. They were also the first to prove that plants could grow in lunar soil collected during the Apollo missions. Ferl is also a national leader in space policy, having recently chaired a National Academies of Sciences committee on the direction of space biology research over the next decade.

Biography from Launch Library 2.

Launches