12-05, 09:00–09:50 (Europe/Luxembourg), Banquet Room
Human adaptation to the ever-changing environmental conditions of interstellar travel presents unprecedented challenges to our understanding of health and medicine. Despite our efforts to anticipate potential health threats, unexpected challenges are inevitable during long-duration interstellar missions. This raises a crucial question: How can we adapt clinical research methodologies to develop a more responsive and resilient healthcare infrastructure for interstellar ventures?
This presentation will explore innovative methodological approaches in clinical research that could enhance our preparedness for interstellar travel. It will explore insights from a series of MetaFuturism Lab workshops using an interdisciplinary and multicultural methodology. These workshops engaged diverse groups of individuals from a broad spectrum of disciplines and cultural contexts through speculative future scenarios to foster a nuanced and contextualized dialogue on the future of clinical research in space. This presentation will outline a framework for re-thinking methods for clinical research in the context of interstellar exploration.
Mona Nasser DDS, MSc(DPH), MSc(Astro), PhD, FHEA, is the Director of the Plymouth Institute of Health and Care Research (PIHR) and a Professor of Clinical Epidemiology and Oral Health Research at the University of Plymouth. She is a methodologist, health services researcher, and interdisciplinary scientist. She has received recognition for her work on building new frameworks to inform research prioritization processes. She has been working with members of the Space Medicine Team at the European Astronaut Centre on the Systematic Threat Analysis of Radiation from Space (STARS) project. She leads a research group on the Impact of Space Environment on Craniofacial and Dental Structure (ISECS) at the university, which involves both systematic reviews of space medicine and primary studies. She is also an artist leading an art-science project called MetaFuturism Lab, running speculative futuristic immersive workshops to engage individuals from different disciplines and cultural contexts to reimagine scientific and social concepts in the future.