OSMED is hosting a public Journal Club discussion today on the Astronaut and Spaceflight Participant Archive, or ASPA, a comprehensive dataset documenting every human who has traveled to space.
Hosted by Kate Flickinger, MS, PhD, the session will feature Robert Nagy, PhD, Robert Reynolds, MS, MPH, PhD, and Farhan Asif. The presenters will discuss how ASPA was created, what its initial data reveals, and how the archive may support research in human spaceflight, space medicine, epidemiology, human performance, and related disciplines.
Attendees will also receive a first look at the OSMED Repository as the presenters share their screens during the discussion. The repository is normally available to OSMED members, making this session an opportunity to preview one of the new research resources OSMED is developing.
Thursday, July 23, 2026 5:00 PM ET Open to the public
Register here:
For discussion: What research questions, comparisons, or analytical approaches could a comprehensive archive of spaceflight participants help address?
This is a really exciting initiative. One direction that immediately came to mind is treating ASPA as a longitudinal AI benchmark rather than just an archive. A standardized representation of astronaut timelines could support digital twins, retrieval of similar historical cases, temporal prediction of health outcomes, and future CDSS development. It could also serve as a foundation for benchmarking predictive models across different physiological systems while promoting reproducible space medicine research.
here’s my mail hitaeshi25sehgal@gmail.com . Looking forward to collaborate !
When will more information be available about virtual participation, please? I would not like to miss it accidentally, as I have many events, because Gmail usually shows me posts about events the day after they occur. One day I tried to use forms (if I am right) to get a reminder in my calendar about a specific, one-time-only email, but it turned out to be so convoluted that I resigned after an hour or so of hassling with account rights setup — without success. Even though I am a software developer, sometimes I get fed up with those “bugs.”
