Friday, December 18, 2020 - 13:45
An extension of NASA STEM, the Student Payload Opportunity with Citizen Science (SPOCS) has selected members of the Columbia Space Initiative to be one of five student groups to send an experiment to space. Currently these students are working with the department's own Dietrich Lab, with guidance from PhD candidate Bryan Wang, in order to send a payload containing the bacterium S. aureus and fungus C. albicans to the International Space Station for 30 days. In their experiment description, the team writes: "Our experiment studies the growth patterns of bacteria in microgravity when grown into a biofilm with a fungus to better understand how microorganisms develop antibiotic resistance in space."