Making Healthcare Technology for Exploration Spaceflight

George Pantalos, Ph.D. is a Professor of Cardiovascular and Thoracic Surgery and a Professor of Bioengineering at the University of Louisville. He has been involved with the development, testing, and clinical implementation of surgical devices throughout his career and is creating surgical capabilities for exploration space missions. On-going efforts include surgical site containment and fluid management, surgical instrument design and development, surgical training methods, logistical planning for exploration healthcare, and the use of human-inspired dexterous robots as medical/surgical assistants. Flight evaluation of candidate devices and methods takes place during parabolic and suborbital space flight. He has flown 58 parabolic flight research missions and had one experiment that flew twice on the Space Shuttle and one suborbital flight experiment that flew on the Virgin Galactic SpaceShipTwo.

Thomas (Tommy) J. Roussel, Jr., Ph.D., director of the Bioinstrumentation and Controls R&D Lab and Assistant Director of the Louisville Automation and Robotics Research Institute, is an Associate Professor of Bioengineering at the Speed School of Engineering at UofL. He has 21 years of experience developing custom and off-the-shelf sensor technologies across wide variety of disciplines. His current research includes 3D printing solutions to address medical issues in long-range space travel, and clinical/rehabilitation systems for patients with spinal cord injuries. He holds seven patents and has published 15 journal articles and 75 abstracts and conference papers. His research has been supported by the Wallace H. Coulter Foundation, Kentucky NSF-EPSCoR, NASA, NIH-UofL ExCITE, and the NSF-UofL I-Corps programs. He has flown four parabolic flight research missions.