Houston, we have a Husky
Imelda Muller, a Northeastern University grad, brings expertise in bioastronautics as one of 10 candidates who will undergo training to become an astronaut for NASA’s next generation of flights to the moon and beyond.
NASA has announced its latest class of astronaut candidates, and there is a Husky among them.
In a room packed with astronauts, politicians and press at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, NASA welcomed 10 new astronaut candidates, including Imelda Muller, a Northeastern University class of 2013 graduate.
Selected out of more than 8,000 applicants, Muller, a 34-year-old anesthesiologist from Copake Falls, New York, and the other candidates will spend the next two years training to become an active astronaut. With an expertise in bioastronautics, or space medicine, Muller’s skillset sits at the intersection of space exploration and critical medical care.
“The future of space medicine is now,” she said during NASA’s press conference. She hopes to push the field –– and NASA –– into new frontiers.
“Right now we’re looking at an age of exploration, and when we’re seeking to do things like go back to the moon and utilize the lessons that we learn there to go to Mars, we have a lot of opportunities to learn and to grow and to innovate,” Muller told NGN. “In that era we just have a lot of opportunity to learn lessons that maybe haven’t been taught in the past.”
Growing up in upstate New York, Muller remembers spending nights looking up at the sky and wondering how she could get there.
“It feels like you can see the whole universe. You can see every star,” she says. “I just always had the desire to go, to be there, and I didn’t know what that meant as a kiddo.”
That desire would remain with her even as her career went in a different direction.
Muller earned her bachelor’s in behavioral neuroscience from Northeastern in 2013 and went on to receive her medical degree from the University of Vermont in 2017.
Muller eventually served as a lieutenant in the Navy and, after her training at the Naval Undersea Medical Institute, also as an undersea medical officer in the Navy’s Experimental Diving Unit. As deputy medical department head and institutional review board chair for the unit, she supported health and research endeavors. She also provided medical support during Navy diving training at NASA’s Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory.
It was through those experiences, particularly with long, deep dives, and “the challenges with the human body that I recognized as analogous challenges in space,” she says.
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“That experience gave me the opportunity to work with multidisciplinary teams in experimental and saturation diving,” Muller said. “I developed a passion for learning about the way the body adapts in extreme environments. This led me to pursue medical residency training in anesthesia, where I deepened that understanding of how our body responds when it’s under stress.”
Muller pursued her residency in anesthesia and critical medicine at Johns Hopkins Hospital, which she completed this year. There, she honed her passion for bioastronatics, the interdisciplinary study of how spaceflight impacts humans biologically, medically and behaviorally.
Over the next two years, Muller will undergo NASA training that is virtually unrivaled in its intensity. It will involve learning everything from geology and robotics to space health and aircraft readiness. There will be flight simulations in altitude chambers, and Muller says she’s already excited to return to NASA’s Neutral Buoyancy Lab to dive.
“I’m also excited to do things that I have never done before,” she says. “For me, I don’t have a background in flight, and I’m very excited to learn from our pilots here and our trainers here in ways to get off the ground.”
At the end of it, Muller will count herself among the select few members of the U.S. active astronaut corps who will embark on missions to the moon and beyond.
“At the end of the day, when you have a good team, you can really accomplish any mission,” she says.
With NASA, she aims to tackle the unique challenges involved with providing health care in high-intensity environments, whether that’s at the bottom of the ocean or in outer space. However, while her training will prepare her for life above, her focus is still very much on what happens on Earth.
“I’m incredibly excited to be here alongside this team and to build on that foundation with the greater NASA community because … with upcoming exploration missions, we are pushing the boundaries of human performance,” Muller said. “The lessons that we learn, the knowledge that we gain, all of these things are going to help us to excel not just in space but in areas of human health here on Earth.”
