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2024 AE FELLOW PUSHES THE LIMIT OF THE HUMAN BODY IN ANTARCTICA
Even as a child, I was inspired by the diaries of heroic explorers – Robert F Scott, who explored the North and South Poles, Alexander von Humboldt, who traversed the deepest jungles and Amelia Earhart who ventured to the highest heights.
2024 Amelia Earhart Fellow Carmen Possnig
Growing up, Carmen always dreamed of becoming an explorer and soon realized that the modern-day equivalent would be space exploration.
This past July, Carmen, a medical doctor, member of the European Space Agency’s astronaut reserve and Ph.D. candidate in space physiology at the University of Innsbruck, Austria, joined 29 other women in receiving a 2024 Zonta International Amelia Earhart Fellowship. As a general practitioner, Carmen found that she appreciated the human connections she made but hungered to do more research that might benefit humankind globally.
To that end, Carmen spent an entire year in Antarctica investigating how the human body adapts to extreme environments She not only encountered the breathtaking
beauty of the most extreme continent in the world, but also her own personal limits. She published a report called, “South of the End of the World: Where the night lasts four months and a warm day is minus 50 degrees - My year in Antarctica.” The report focuses on her time in Antarctica and gives the reader an inside look of her entire experience. Today, her ongoing research focuses on how the body and mind change in microgravity, with the aim of keeping astronauts healthy and fit on future spaceflights
After completing her doctoral program, Carmen envisions further advancing human space exploration and contributing to humanity’s efforts of going back to the moon or onto Mars In addition to Earth-based space research, she also hopes one day to go to space herself. In 2022, she was selected out of 22,000 applicants into the new astronaut class of the European Space Agency as a reserve astronaut.
To learn more about the research Carmen is conducting, her view of special sciences, and the impact she would like to have on aspiring women scientists, watch the inspirational video on the bottom.
