Space Medicine Ireland was delighted to award their second annual Aerospace Medicine bursary prize to Pádraig Cronin, UCC Graduate Entry Medical student and former aerospace engineer. Pádraig will receive a €500 prize and a certificate from the Space Medicine Ireland team. The award followed a competitive process of Irish and International students submitting their essays for review to judges Dr Rowena Christiansen (University of Melbourne) and Dr Edson Oliveira (Centre for Aerospace Medicine, University of Lisbon). Their unanimous decision marks the first time this award will go to an Irish student.
The inaugural award was presented in 2022 to Dr Nina Purvis, St Bart's and the London School of Medicine and Dentistry. The 2022 judges were Dr David Green of the European Space Agency and Dr Ed Powers, Director of Flight Medicine, Axiom Space.
Space Medicine Ireland was grateful to Dublin's Museum of Literature for hosting the award announcement and scientific meeting on June 2nd 2023.
The meeting chair, Dr Lisa McNamee, announced that the Space Medicine Ireland team has had recognition at the annual Aerospace Medicine Association Meeting in the US for the second year running. The 2023 project presented by Rob O'Connell, a medical student at University College Dublin, was shortlisted for the Young Investigator Award at the New Orleans meeting. The project uses data from spinal injury patients to look at a new mathematical model for predicting the risk of kidney stones (urolithiasis) developing in spaceflight. The project lead is University College Dublin graduate Mr Derek Hennessy FRCS FEBU, Consultant Urologist.
This builds on a stellar first year for the society, where they had academic presentations accepted at the Aerospace Medicine Association Meeting in Reno, Nevada, the International Astronautical Congress, Paris, and the International Congress of Aerospace Medicine. Dr McNamee was awarded the Anita Mantri PhD award in Aerospace Medicine 2022 for achievement in Aerospace Medicine education and outreach. This was the first time an Irish person received this award. The society was cofounded in 2021 by Dr Philip Brady and Dr Lisa McNamee, who met on a European Space Agency Space Physician Training course.
Professor Lokesh Joshi Stokes, Professor of Glycosciences, was Friday's keynote speaker and spoke of his exciting work applying lessons learned in molecular science to spaceflight applications. The meeting also heard from Dr Aamir Hameed, cofounder of Pumping Heart, a cardiology ventricular assist device that has received significant investment from Enterprise Ireland.
The next Space Medicine meeting will be scheduled for the late summer in the west of Ireland and will aim to build further collaboration between Ireland's medical, engineering and MedTech communities. Interested parties can get in touch via Twitter @spacemedireland
