Former UW grad student returns to speak on space medicine

Dr. Dave Williams, NASA astronaut and director of the Space and Life Sciences Directorate at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, will be on campus for two days the last week of March to meet with leaders of the UW’s participation in the National Space Biomedical Research Institute. (See the March 1 Univeristy Week.) His host will be Dr. Martin Kushmerick, director of the UW space medicine project.

Williams will make a presentation open to the campus community at 4 p.m., Thursday, March 29, in room A-118 of the Physics/Astronomy Building.

Dave Williams

He is known at the UW because he received training in advanced invertebrate physiology at the Friday Harbor Labs before returning to McGill University in Montreal, where he earned an undergraduate degree in biology, for a medical degree. He then completed a residency in family practice at the University of Ottawa and a residency in emergency medicine at the University of Toronto.

He was selected as an astronaut by the Canadian Space Agency in 1992 and then joined the 1995 international class of NASA mission specialist astronaut candidates. He served as mission specialist on a 16-day flight in 1998.

Williams was named director of the Space and Life Sciences Directorate at Johnson Space Center in 1998, giving him overall responsibility for research in both the physical and biomedical space sciences at the Space Center. Overall crew medical safety is one of his principal concerns, along with flight medical operations and Space Center occupational and environmental health.

The programs he oversees are directed toward protecting astronauts from the hazards of the space environment, including space radiation and microgravity, and maintaining their medical, physical and psychological well-being while aloft and on return to Earth. His other oversight responsibilities include areas of telemedicine, 3-D tissue culture/regeneration in microgravity, curatorial management of extraterrestrial materials and qualifying humans for very long space journeys.