Highlights from the Cambridge Science Festival
Kristoff Misquitta shares how developing rapid diagnostics for space could also benefit low-resource and remote regions on Earth
Last week, Genes in Space participated in an outreach event at the MIT Museum in Cambridge, MA, as part of the annual Cambridge Science Festival. Participants heard from two of our past winners— Anna-Sophia Boguraev (2015), and Kristoff Misquitta (2020) — to hear how developing an experiment for the ISS has impacted their academic journey. Following the talks, attendees joined us for hands-on demonstrations of the same equipment astronauts use to research space biology aboard the International Space Station and asked questions of our winners. Younger participants made pipetting art and learned about DNA, while older students were challenged to think about how spaceflight conditions might affect how human bodies function.
Both Kristoff and Anna-Sophia are currently enrolled in MIT programs. Kristoff is an undergraduate entering his Senior year in the Aerospace Engineering program, and Anna-Sophia is completing the Harvard/MIT MD-PhD program. We were also lucky enough to be joined by MIT graduate students and current Genes in Space mentors Julie McDonald and Marissa Morales.
