Space and Plants

Here is a blog post that I wrote in 2012.

There are two great intellectual loves in my life, space and plants. They seem an incongruous pair, but somehow they have found common ground in my life.

When I was a little girl I dreamed of traveling to other planets, seeing our giant sun rise over Mercury, surfing through waves of gas on Jupiter, and skiing on frozen Pluto. I clung to every space-based fiction I could find, longing to see the beauty in a planet other than our own.

Even as I entertained such fantasies, I chose to be among plants. Playtime was in the garden, where fresh-off-the-tree peaches were my sustenance and climbing trees were space ships. When it came time to do homework I collected flowers and made arrangements to bring a touch of the garden indoors.

When TNG introduced the character Keiko, I caught a first glimpse of how a person so in love with plants could bring their passion with them to space, as the ship's chief biologist and head of the arboretum. She had a busy and rewarding career which revolved both around space & plants. My fantasies drifted in that direction, and so playtime became more garden-focused. What can do well in this spot, how much should I water this plant vs that one? I grew house plants as well, because surely if I were to grow plants on a spaceship I must first keep them alive in my own home.

With an A+ in junior high science courses, I was on the right track. But a B high school honor's Chemistry destroyed my confidence and took me away from choosing to study science in college. I still played with plants, but I studied languages - French & Spanish, linguistics courses, too. I loved the patterns within language, even then unintentionally viewing it from the perspective of a scientist. Then I took general biology from a botanist named Bruce Smith who saw my interest in plants and let me join in his lab's research with plant metabolism. A switch of degree path to Botany followed by a change to another university - I finished my undergrad with a degree in Genetics & Plant Biology from UC Berkeley in 2008 (though the paperwork finally processed in '09). I had picked the ultimate grad program for merging my two intellectual loves - a PhD program in Botany at Miami of Ohio, where I get to work with Dr. John Kiss and his postdoc Dr. Kathy Millar on their lab's spaceflight projects, understanding plant response to light and gravity.

I am delighted to be where I am today: studying plants in space: samples of plants grown on the Shuttle (BRIC-16 project, STS-131 shuttle mission) to investigate in the lab, and my little vegetable/herb garden and orchids at home.

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Now, here I am at the start of 2022. I grow microgreens at NASA's Kennedy Space Center with Dr. Ray Wheeler, Dr. Ye Zhang, and Dr. Gioia Massa as my mentors. I am at the heart of space crop research every day.

2012 - 2022, still doing what I love.

Here is a photo of Cherry Belle radish microgreens.