One Pitt student team will get the opportunity to send their experiment to the ISS

Are you curious about how medicine delivery might need to be modified in microgravity? Do you want to know the weird ways chemistry may behave differently in a diminished magnetic field? A small team of Pitt undergraduate students will get the chance to answer a pressing cosmic question — as long as the experiment is small enough — by sending a mini lab to the International Space Station (ISS) as part of the Student Spaceflight Experiments Program (SSEP), Mission 22.

An initiative of the National Center for Earth and Space Science Education, the program gives groups of students from grades 5 to 16 an opportunity to ask a scientific question that can only be answered in space. One group each from up to 30 participating institutions will travel to the Kennedy Space Center and watch their experiment launch into low Earth orbit.

Because of space constraints, each lab must fit into the equivilant of about three small test tubes. Once in orbit, an astronaut will conduct the experiment according to the teams’ experimental protocol.

“As long as they have a brain, an imagination, willingness and enthusiasm, we need them,” said Afshin Beheshti, professor in the Department of Surgery and the Department of Computational and Systems Biology, both in the schools of the health sciences. 

Beheshti is also the director of the Center for Space Medicine at the Trivedi Institute for Space and Global Biomedicine. The Trivedi Institute funded Pitt’s entry fee and will pay for the selected team to travel to Florida, where they’ll hand off their experiment to NASA.  

Each team will have three to five students, each working with a faculty member advisor. The number of teams that can participate is only limited by the number of advisors available. Thanks to help from Pitt Space’s Alan George, R&H Mickle Endowed Chair of Electrical and Computer Engineering in the Swanson School of Engineering, and Michael Ramsey, professor of environmental science in the Kenneth P. Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences, Beheshti has already received queries from interested students and willing faculty. He’s actively looking for more participants — especially faculty who have the lab space to host a control experiment while their study is carried out in space.

The teams should be in place by Sept. 1, and Nov. 3 is the deadline for teams to send their final proposals to a faculty committee that will choose three to advance to the final selection stage. On Dec. 18, the National Center for Earth and Space Science Education will choose one experiment from each participating institution to be carried out on the ISS for SSEP Mission 22, scheduled for late spring 2027.

[Read about three other student experiments that made it to space.]

There’s also an artistic component that Beheshti hopes can engage an even broader group of participants.

“Every mission has to have a mission patch,” Beheshti said. He’s partnering with Aaron Henderson, associate professor of film and media studies in the Dietrich School to fold the broader community into this aspect of the project.

“It could be high school, middle school or elementary school students,” working together to design a patch symbolizing Pitt’s latest space endeavor. And the groups aren’t limited to five people like the undergraduate teams, so even more people will have the chance to take part.

This won’t be the first time Pitt sends a science project to the ISS via SSEP. On Mission 14, Swanson School students examined the effects of microgravity on the oxidation of 3D printed aluminum with unique topography. Students from the School of Pharmacy were selected for Mission 13 for their proposal to do a transcriptomic analysis of Escherichia coli response to ciprofloxacin in microgravity. The Community College of Allegheny County has also sent two experiments to the ISS.

Interested in advising a group of students? Email Afshin Beheshti at Beheshti [at] pitt.edu.