Team photo post-flight - 2017 Microgravity Campaign, National Research Council, Ottawa, Canada (Photo credit: Adrien Mauduit) As I wait for clearance to tell you exactly what we were up to earlier this month with the PoSSUM crew and Final Frontier Design team in Florida, I want to take some time to tell you about [...]
Shawna Pandya, a citizen-scientist astronaut with Project Polar Suborbital Science in the Upper Mesosphere (PoSSUM), goes over some pre-flight prep with Derek Gowanlock on-board a Falcon 20 aircraft at the Ottawa MacDonald-Cartier International Airport before testing an experimental high-altitude spacesuit The next step in testing for a new type of spacesuit is in Ottawa this week, [...]
Twenty thousand feet above Ottawa, Shawna Pandya floats gently out of her seat and executes a graceful midair swoop. Our Falcon 20 jet is halfway through a series of parabolas, which produce brief periods of microgravity, the classic “vomit comet” flight profile used to train astronauts, give adventurous tourists a taste of space, and film cool [...]
" Meet Dr. Shawna Pandya, a general physician by profession, whose job titles at times have included runway model, neurosurgical resident, entrepreneur, taekwondo champion and now, citizen-scientist astronaut candidate " By Surbhi Gogia History is witness to superhumans born with gifted powers to acquire multiple academic accolades or excel in their fields at a very young [...]
(Heads up: This post deals with graphic, difficult and heavy medical situations that may be difficult or traumatizing to some.) -- As I finish a stretch of 4 nights of ER shifts culminating in a 26-hour ICU call shift followed by a clinic half-day, it occurs to me that I have seen more death and illness [...]
As I come off a 70hr work stretch - 62hrs of rural emergency followed by 8hrs of a 31-patient clinic - some things occur to me. This past weekend was a heavy weekend that saw many acute patients with pathologies of all flavors - acute coronary syndromes, respiratory failures, drug overdoses, drug-induced psychoses, partial finger amputations, [...]
Help build India's next generation of space scholars! The Kalpana Chawla Scholarship endowment fund has been established to identify and help fund three exceptional Indian post-graduate students to attend the International Space University’s Space Studies Program, starting with the 2015 program at Ohio University (Ohio, USA). As it moves forward, leading the development of space technologies [...]
Some of you had been asking for a link to the #SolveForXX keynote I did at the Jean Forest Leadership Academy for teenaged girls earlier this year. The recording isn't available, but here is a text excerpt from one of my favorite parts - thoughts on leadership. Enjoy! 12 Lessons on Leadership This is an amazing [...]
In March and April of this year, I had the honor and privilege of working first on a military base, then in a refugee clinic. Soldiers, refugees...both these groups have more in common than you might think. In many cases, the level of trauma and horror that some of these men and women have endured simply [...]
This past weekend, I had the honor and privilege of keynoting at the Alberta Medical Students Conference and Retreat, a conference I had attended myself as a medical student. I spent part of the talk discussing questions I thought were important in deciding on a medical specialty. I share it here, for those who might find [...]
