Dr. Richard Wassersug, a professor at the Department of Anatomy and Neurobiology of Dalhousie University in Halifax, is going to present a free public talk at VSSEC and talk to students. A tour of the VSSEC facilities will be offered to guests 30 mins prior to the session.
Dr. Wassersug is interested in how the space environment affects living organisms. Most of his research has been on amphibians such as tadpoles. He has been Principal Investigator for an impressive number of experiments flown on the U.S. Space Shuttle.
He explains how he accidentally became a space biologist: “I serendipitously got invited into the field some 15 years ago. Back then, a group at NASA was planning to raise frog eggs on the space shuttle to see how gravity (and the absence thereof) affected the early development of vertebrates. The mission was long enough to bring back live tadpoles on Earth. These were the first alien life forms—after all, they were born in space!—to arrive on our planet. In order to tell whether the space tadpoles were normal, NASA invited me in to study them upon their arrival at Cape Canaveral.”