Dementia Researcher

Today is the UK Space Agency Mars Day, it celebrates the 6th anniversary of the launch of the first ExoMars mission, and a year since NASA’s Perseverance rover started exploring Mars. In just three years’ time NASA aims to return humans to the Moon as part of the Artemis Mission, and in just a decade it’s onward to the surface of Mars – the tech and engineering may be ready, but are we? Being in space has well-documented negative effects on the body. But the effect of being in space on the brain has been studied less. In this podcast Dr Yvonne Couch, ARUK Research Fellow at University of Oxford hosts a discussion with three world leading experts to explore the effects of space travel on the brain. We’re joined by Chris Mason, Professor of Genomics, Physiology, and Biophysics at Weill Cornell Medicine, USA. Chris is one of the people behind the landmark Twins Study that followed identical twins Scott and Mark Kelly, while one spent a year on earth and the other spent a year in space – he works with NASA, run