NASA dream becomes a reality for one student - UNC Eshelman School of Pharmacy

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Daniel Alexander
November 6, 2024

Fourth-year pharmacy student Emma Ives has been broadening her horizons in the NASA/Johnson Space Center Aerospace Medicine Clerkship program in Houston, Texas. Over her clerkship, Ives met with NASA astronauts, scientists, and engineers, toured the facilities and the campus of the space center, and worked on a research project.

Being able to experience NASA has been a lifelong dream for Ives. “I grew up playing in the cardboard ISS module my dad made for me in our living room, so to then go to the actual module and run around in it was a super fun and very surreal.”

Aerospace medicine focuses on keeping people involved in air and space travel healthy and safe in some particularly challenging living conditions. The clerkship includes a classroom didactic experience and a research experience. Participants take what they learn in class from NASA experts and use it in their research projects built around one of NASA’s many missions. “It’s incredibly common for clerks’ projects to be pulled out in high-level NASA meetings and for clerks to write protocols that are used in future missions,” said Ives.

Ives’ research project was centered around mapping potential medication impacts to physiologic models used for extravehicular activities, or activities performed by an astronaut outside of the spacecraft.

As the only pharmacy student in this cohort, Ives felt a responsibility to be a good representative for the profession. “You’re going to meetings and labs and you’re acting as the pharmacy expert to a group of engineers or scientists who don’t speak pharmacy” she said. “It’s like learning how to speak another language.”

Ives is the second pharmacy student ever to take part in this program. The first was Tom Diaz, ’24, who was also a UNC Eshelman School of Pharmacy student when he completed the program in 2023.

Ives joined by her cohort at NASA’s Neutral Buoyancy Lab

Ives spent an entire day in NASA’s neutral buoyancy lab. Sitting by the pool deck, she discussed research with Canadian astronauts who were using the 40-foot-deep pool to simulate the gravity conditions present during spaceflight. “You look up and you see the viewing area that all of the public is walking through to look at the neutral buoyancy lab and you’re just like I can’t believe that I’m down here,” said Ives.

One lesson Ives learned during the clerkship was the importance of being a creative thinker as a pharmacist. “A lot of what we do at NASA is take our background knowledge about guideline directed therapy or what is the initial recommended treatment and then innovate,” said Ives. Factors such as limited room on the spacecraft and if the drug can serve multiple uses can determine whether it will be brought on a mission. “Sometimes what’s first line is not what’s going to be the best option to send to the space station,” said Ives.

Ives believes that the type of creative thinking done at NASA can correlate to fields such as emergency medicine, infectious disease, or critical care. “You might be in an environment where you don’t have the textbook stuff that you want and so being able to be a creative thinker and be intuitive when it comes to treatment and patients, I think that’s really at the core of what the clerkship is teaching.”

Ives believes her experience at NASA has created a solid foundation for her future career. “I would love one day to work at NASA,” said Ives. “There’s definitely more that needs to be done with my research project and hopefully one day I can come back and finish it.”