As an MPH student, Avalon Monti didn’t imagine one day using her public health skills to help prepare astronauts for future missions to Mars. Then, Monti saw an open position for an epidemiologist at NASA, and impressed the hiring team with the systems thinking skills she had developed at Cornell. Systems thinking aligns with the Human Health and Performance contract’s goals, says Monti, which include “building an entire astronaut health risk network to see how different risks interact with each other.”

Monti and her team report on health outcome data from astronauts on short-term space missions to inform what to expect on longer-term missions. For example, if an astronaut is losing bone mineral density on a short, three-month mission, Monti’s team wants to understand “how might that translate to a three-year mission—would the astronaut be more likely to have bone fractures, or not?”

Monti studied economics as an undergraduate and wanted to understand more about socioeconomic factors at the population level. At Cornell, while concentrating in infectious disease epidemiology, she sought out a variety of applied public health projects to practice data analysis, including an internship where she analyzed and developed visuals for farm-to-school survey data. As a NASA epidemiologist, she also develops surveys for physicians and astronauts who are testing cutting-edge medical technologies such as holo-projections for telehealth visits.

“It’s really different coming from an infectious disease background to something more clinical,” says Monti, who wasn’t familiar with most medical terminology before applying to NASA. She is happy to be applying her skills to learning a new field, and loves her team. “It’s a good environment to work in, and everyone is very helpful—they understand that new hires probably don’t come on board already knowing aerospace medicine!” In the next decade or so, Monti could see herself pursuing a PhD focused on a specific area of epidemiology, such as musculoskeletal injury.

Written by Audrey Baker