Daniella BEZDAN

Green Space • Head

Daniela Bezdan holds the position of the Head of the Green Space Center and have been the former Chief Scientific Officer at YURI GmbH, a pioneering company in the field of commercial spaceflight, focusing on research and development for microgravity experiments on the International Space Station (ISS). In her role, Daniela Bezdan is at the forefront of developing innovative products for the ISS, exploiting the unique conditions of microgravity to foster advancements in healthcare. As a serial entrepreneur, she has also co-founded several ventures, including Poppy Health, specializing in pathogen surveillance, and Analog LLC, dedicated to astronaut training.

Daniela Bezdan maintains an active role in scientific publishing, with affiliations at the University Hospital of Tübingen's Institute of Medical Genetics and Applied Genomics and the NGS Competence Center Tübingen (NCCT), contributing over 50 publications in areas fields of systems biology, developmental biology, regulatory genomics, metagenomics, pathogen surveillance ISS, rare disease, oncology, bacterial adaptation in space and astronaut health. Her involvement in significant projects such as the NASA Twin Study, and biomolecule sequencing initiatives in microgravity and pathogen surveillance on the ISS.

In her capacity as Chair of the NASA GeneLab Microbiome Analysis Working Group and Founder and Co-Chair of the International Space Standards Operation Procedure (ISSOP), as well as a member of the European Space Agency (ESA)-funded Space Omics Topical Team, Daniela contributes significantly to the field of space biology and more recently in European Space Health politics. She also is an active member of the German DeCOI network—a national initiative leveraging NGS-based omics data in COVID-19 research and has been the Executive Director of the MetaSUB Consortium, which investigates urban microbiomes and transmission pathways in more than 150 cities and 30 countries.

In 2021/22 Daniela Bezdan was an ESA Astronaut Candidate expanding her knowledge about the training requirements of Astronauts and Astronaut Health.

Daniela Bezdan holds degrees in organic chemistry, biotechnology, biokinetics, genomics, and bioinformatics. Throughout her academic career, she has been affiliated with various institutions and hospitals worldwide, including EMBL in Heidelberg (Germany), the Max-Planck-Institute in Tübingen (Germany), the University Hospital in Tuebingen (Germany), Bumrungrad Hospital Bangkok (Thailand), the University of Kyoto (Japan), the CRG in Barcelona (Spain), UCSD in San Diego (USA), and the Weill-Cornell-Med in New York (USA). She received several prices and fellowship such as JST Japan Society of Research and Technology, DAAD Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst, INTERSTIP University of Applied Sciences Mannheim, CREST Core Research for Evolutional Science and Technology, International Ph.D. fellowship, Max-Plank-Institute, and a Ph.D. award from the Marquardt Foundation.

Events

International Astronautical Congress 2024

14-18 October 2024

Milan, Italy

Participation: