Dr Elizabeth Blaber

Liz is a former Honours and PhD student of the Burns lab and is now an established group leader in the field of space science at NASA. Elizabeth was awarded the inaugural and highly prestigious VSSEC-NASA Australian Space Prize in 2010. The Prize was established to promote quality space-related research in Australia and raise awareness of study and career opportunities for students. Elizabeth’s Honours thesis was rated as the best in Australia in this field. She was the first Australian student to join the NASA Academy program and realised a dream of working on a NASA project. Elizabeth worked on mouse bone tissue from whole animals that were flown on the STS-131 shuttle mission in 2010. Here Elizabeth investigated the influence of spaceflight on tissue regeneration using whole animals and cellular models flown on NASA's space shuttle missions’ STS-131, STS-133 and STS-135 that formed the basis of her PhD, the first of its kind undertaken with an Australian university.