Scott Smith

Recognized under Tier 9 — Extraterrestrial Healthcare, Scott Smith has built a long career researching nutritional biochemistry for human spaceflight at NASA Johnson Space Center. Smith's work on how nutrition affects and interacts with the physiological changes of spaceflight — including bone loss, oxidative stress, fluid shifts, and immune and endocrine responses to the space environment — has established the scientific basis for nutritional countermeasures and dietary requirements for long-duration missions. On a Mars colony, where food will be produced locally under constrained conditions and resupply is not an option, getting nutritional requirements right from the start will be essential to crew health, and Smith's research provides the science that makes that possible.