Professor Lawrence Young of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology will speak at CU-Â鶹¹ÙÍø Thursday, Jan. 21, on the challenges of human exploration of the solar system.
Young is the Apollo Program Professor of Astronautics at MIT and also directs the National Space Biomedical Research Institute headquartered at the Baylor College of Medicine. He will speak on threats to human health created by long space flights to planets like Mars and their relationships to health problems on Earth. He also will focus on the use of spinning devices -- from small centrifuges to spacecraft rotation-- as a means of overcoming health problems through artificial gravity.
The talk will be held at 5 p.m. Jan. 21 in room ESCI 185 of the Geological Sciences Building. Sponsored by CU-Â鶹¹ÙÍø's aerospace engineering sciences department and the CU-headquartered Colorado Space Grant Consortium as part of the K.D. Wood Colloquium, the talk is free and open to the public.
Young joined the MIT faculty in 1962 and co-founded the Man-Vehicle Laboratory, where research is conducted on visual systems, passageway design, flight simulation, space motion sickness and manual control and displays.
In 1991, Young was named a payload specialist for NASA's Spacelab Life Sciences 2 mission. He spent two years training at Johnson Space Center, serving as an alternate payload specialist during the 1993 mission.
Young has been a visiting professor at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, at NASA's Ames Research Center in California and at Stanford University. He was president of the Biomedical Engineering Society in 1979 and received the prestigious Koetser Foundation Prize in Zurich in 1998 for his contributions to neuroscience.
For more information, call aerospace engineering at 303-492-6417 or Jim Scott in the CU-Â鶹¹ÙÍø News Services office at 303-492-3114.