High-Altitude Research

MEDICINE | Every blast-off from the Kennedy Space Center is something of a nail-biter—befitting a controlled explosion of thousands of pounds of propellant. But for UVM Larner College of Medicine’s Scott Tighe, Julie Dragon, and Kirsten Tracy, the November 10 launch of the 29th SpaceX resupply mission to the International Space Station (ISS) had added personal weight. Tighe is technical director for the Advanced Genome Technologies Core; Dragon is associate professor of microbiology and molecular genetics and the director of the Vermont

Biomedical Research Network Data Science Core; Tracy is a senior scientist in the Vermont Integrative Genomics Resource Core. For three years, the trio worked on an experimental project to give astronauts a mechanism to extract DNA for analysis in-flight in an automated way, a need that will only become more acute as NASA expands its program of longer missions to the Moon and beyond. This first-phase UVM project, called µTitan, or Micro-Titan, reached the ISS on November 11. After a month in action, it was returned to Earth in mid-December.