Feb. 1, 2026
From Space to the Steel City
Microbiologist and former NASA astronaut Kate Rubins heads the new Trivedi Institute for Space and Global Medicine at the University of Pittsburgh Health Sciences.
TOPICS: Education
Designs on Aging-Ready
By Strategic Communications
Kate Rubins still isn't quite sure what stood out about her application to be a NASA astronaut.
She submitted it on a lark in 2008, after a friend half-seriously passed along the posting. At the time, Rubins was a microbiologist and fellow at MIT’s Whitehead Institute, where her lab focused on pox viruses. She didn’t have the military or piloting experience she thought would be expected of most astronauts. Even among the scientists who had been chosen in the past, basic-science biologists were rare.
And yet, Rubins jokes, “Be careful what you apply for, because you could be on the top end of a rocket at some point.”
She ended up spending 300 days in space over the course of two missions in 2016 and 2020-21. Aboard the International Space Station (ISS), she became the first person to sequence DNA in space, grew engineered heart cells to see how microgravity affected them, and conducted hundreds of other experiments.
It turned out that her application to NASA arrived at a fortuitous turning point, when standard crews on the ISS had expanded from three to six. While astronauts had long conducted scientific experiments in space, she says, “With six people up there, a much bigger fraction of the astronaut's time could be devoted to science.” That also meant opportunities for a wider variety of scientists to come aboard.
“The idea is to use spaceflight science to drive biomedical innovation that helps human health on Earth. There are so many people on the planet who can benefit from this work.”
Kate Rubins, professor of computational and systems biology
Rubins doesn’t think her specific expertise in virology and microbiology was what got her selected as an astronaut trainee. But her experience working amid challenging conditions while conducting mpox research and fieldwork in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and in the high-pressure environment of biosafety level 4 labs might have indicated she could handle the strenuous demands of spaceflight.
Now retired as an astronaut, Rubins has landed at the University of Pittsburgh, where she’s determined to bring insights from space down to Earth. As the inaugural director of the recently launched Trivedi Institute for Space and Global Medicine, she believes a wide-ranging program of space biomedicine research will, in turn, serve patients who will never step onto a spaceship.
The effects of microgravity on the human body, for example, offer accelerated models of a wide range of diseases and conditions, especially aging-related diseases and even aging itself. On top of that, she notes, devices developed to support human health in space must be compact, resilient and portable—all qualities that can improve care for people in remote and hard-to-access locations on Earth.
“The idea is to use spaceflight science to drive biomedical innovation that helps human health on Earth,” says Rubins, who is also a professor of computational and systems biology, School of Medicine. “There are so many people on the planet who can benefit from this work.”