About
We began in 2018 when two medical students, Ben and David, both wanted to start a space medicine group at Hopkins and decided to team up. With Dr. Mark Shelhamer as our faculty mentor, we have hosted yearly lectures on the topic of space medicine. Our aim is to introduce this obscure yet exciting specialty to the student body and broaden their understanding of what medicine can do and where it can take you.
Current Leaders: Ben Johnson (Bjohn145@jhmi.edu) and Nabila Ali (nali17@jhmi.edu)
Past Leaders:
2018: David Mampre
2019: Hulai Jalloh
2020: Myan Bhoopalam, Harshath Gupta, Jonathan Lai, Prateek Gowda, Ahmed Farhan, & Lahin Amlani
Current Student Leadership
Nabila Ali
Co-President
Nabila is a medical student at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. She is interested in space medicine and human physiology in extreme environments. She obtained a BS in Biological Sciences from University of California, Irvine, and she has a research background in atmospheric chemistry and in structural biology. She is currently working on a project studying neurovestibular adaptation in outer space. Her favorite celestial object is the Helix Nebula.
Ben Johnson
Co-President
Ben is a medical student at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine planning to specialize in Aerospace Medicine and Emergency Medicine. His previous education has been a BS in Human Science from Georgetown University and MSc degrees in Human Cognitive Neuropsychology and Space Physiology and Health from the universities of Edinburgh and King’s College London, respectively. He loves cooking, eating, traveling, video games, and meeting new people.
Our Faculty Advisor
Mark Shelhamer, ScD
Faculty Advisor
Dr. Shelhamer started at Johns Hopkins as a postdoctoral fellow in 1990. At MIT, he worked on sensorimotor physiology and modeling, including the study of astronaut adaptation to space flight. He then came to Johns Hopkins where he continued the study of sensorimotor adaptation with an emphasis on the vestibular and oculomotor systems. He has applied nonlinear dynamical analysis to the control of eye movements, including investigations of the functional implications of fractal activity in physiological behavior. In parallel with these activities, he has had support from NASA to study sensorimotor adaptation to space flight, amassing a fair amount of parabolic flight (“weightless”) experience in the process. He also serves as an advisor to the commercial spaceflight industry on the research potential of suborbital space flight. Dr. Shelhamer is the author of Nonlinear Dynamics in Physiology: A State-Space Approach, has published over 70 scientific papers, and has had research support from NIH, NSF, NASA, NSBRI, and the Whitaker Foundation. From 2013 to 2016, he served as NASA’s Chief Scientist for human research at the Johnson Space Center.