EX-UBC bird researcher could be about to reach for the stars
A former University of B.C. researcher who spent part of her career studying how some birds are able to fly as high as Mount Everest may soon be going beyond the skies herself as a NASA astronaut.
Jessica Meir, who spent three years as a zoology researcher at UBC, started her training this week as one of eight candidates chosen from a pool of 6,000 applicants for NASA’s 2013 astronaut class. The group will spend the next two years at the Johnson Space Center in Houston training for possible space travel.
Meir was unavailable for an interview Thursday, but in a NASA YouTube video, she said being an astronaut fulfils a life dream.
“What I’m looking forward to the most … would be eventually, hopefully flying in space since that has been my dream since I was about five years old,” said Meir, an American who grew up in Maine.
At 36, Meir has an impressive list of accomplishments to her name. Most recently, she worked as an assistant professor of anesthesia at Harvard Medical School, doing research at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston.
A graduate of Brown University, Meir also has a master’s degree from the International Space University in Strasbourg, France. She completed her doctorate at Scripps Institution of Oceanography in California, carrying out most of her research in Antarctica, where she studied how penguins survive deep dives.
In her video, Meir, who is a scuba diver and a licensed pilot, said she is looking forward to her “real flight training in jets.”
This is not Meir’s first time working for NASA.
In the early 2000s, she did physiology research for the space agency, and was an “aquanaut” in their underwater diving habitat in Florida. She also conducted experiments on International Space Station astronauts on the effects of space flight and microgravity on the human body.
In 2009, Meir joined UBC’s department of zoology where she researched bar-headed geese. The species, which migrate twice a year over the Himalayas, fly at altitudes of about 6,000 metres and are even spotted as high as the summit of Mount Everest.
To understand how the birds manage to migrate at altitudes with incredibly low oxygen levels, Meir raised a gaggle of geese from birth so they would imprint on her.
The birds saw Meir as their mother and followed her everywhere as she raised them, said her supervisor Bill Milsom, a UBC zoology professor.
Milsom said Meir trained the birds to fly in the UBC wind tunnel wearing little masks and backpacks to monitor their heart rate and oxygen usage while flying under normal and reduced oxygen levels.