Emily Perry, a PhD student here in the School of Psychology, is part of an all-women research team which has secured funding from the European Space Agency (ESA) Academy Experiments Programme to explore the impact of non-invasive brain stimulation in spaceflight conditions.
The team, named V-STARS (Vestibular Stochastic Techniques for Adaptive Responses in Spaceflight), is composed entirely of women – a significant milestone in a sector where women represent only 20% of the workforce. The team will conduct experiments using the ESA’s Orbital Robotics Lab (ORL) platform, a cutting-edge robotic system that can create a floating sensation to simulate microgravity. This project will be the first human experiment ever conducted on the ESA robotic weightlessness platform.
The project aims to investigate whether galvanic vestibular stimulation – a type of brain stimulation which works on the brain’s balance (“vestibular”) system – can help the brain adapt to microgravity. Exposure to microgravity can disrupt this system, causing cognitive and perceptual challenges for astronauts. Accordingly, finding strategies to enhance adaptation to weightlessness has the potential to significantly improve astronaut performance and wellbeing in the future.
Emily will work with four Birkbeck, University of London students on the project including Helene Grandchamp des Raux, Isabel Risco Navarez, Milena da Silva Baiao, and Maryam Haq who is leading the research. The V-STARS team is supervised by Professor Elisa Raffaella Ferrè, Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience and Head of the School of Psychology at Birkbeck, and Dr Maria Gallagher, Lecturer in Cognition and Neuroscience at Kent’s School of Psychology.
On being awarded the funding, Emily said: ‘It is a great feeling to have been awarded this funding from the ESA and we cannot wait to get started. We hope to find out whether astronauts’ abilities to adapt to weightlessness can be enhanced through non-invasive brain stimulation as this would ultimately improve performance and wellbeing during space missions. It’s really exciting to cross over my psychology expertise into the field of space.’
For more information on the ESA research project please see Birkbeck’s news piece: https://www.bbk.ac.uk/news/birkbeck-students-secure-european-space-agency-funding-for-human-spaceflight-research