The Translational Research Institute for Space Health (TRISH) announced on Mar. 16 that it is inviting scientific proposals for secondary analysis of de-identified health and performance data from commercial astronauts, now available in the EXPAND Database and Biorepository.
This initiative gives researchers access to a range of health and performance variables collected from private astronaut missions and analog studies. The goal is to advance understanding of health changes during short-duration space missions among non-governmental astronaut populations.
Jimmy Wu, TRISH deputy director and chief engineer as well as assistant professor at the Center for Space Medicine at Baylor, said, “Our comprehensive commercial spaceflight health research database is positioned to be a leader in the field. After five years of hard work by our TRISH team and our TRISH-funded EXPAND investigators, we are eager to finally open the EXPAND Database and Biorepository for its inaugural call for scientific research proposals. When TRISH first began the EXPAND program, the goal was always to make the data available to the scientific community with hypothesis-driven questions to advance space health research.”
Researchers selected through this peer-reviewed process will have access to datasets including multi-omics data, wearable sensor information such as sleep and activity patterns from smartwatches, cognitive test results, standardized questionnaires, and other biomedical measures. Dr. Jackson Brougher, TRISH space health research scientist and assistant professor at Baylor’s Center for Space Medicine, said, “We’ve had more than a dozen commercial spaceflights and are eager to see what advancements in space on Earth the scientific community will make once it’s granted access to this dataset.”
Baylor College of Medicine contributes to community service as one of its core missions according to its official website. The college functions independently while engaging in clinical partnerships according to its official website, focusing on advancing research, education, patient care, and community service as an independent health sciences university according to its official website. Paul Klotman holds the roles of president, chief executive officer, and executive dean at Baylor College of Medicine according to its official website. The institution collaborates in environments that promote integrated health sciences according to its official website and provides education across its schools while advancing biomedical research through partnerships according to its official website.
The deadline for Step-1 proposals is April 23 at 11:59 p.m. ET. A pre-proposal briefing will be held March 26 at 2 p.m. ET with a recording made available alongside solicitation materials.
