Christina Cheung Selected as NASA Outreach Lead

Young Scientist Christina Cheung is now serving as the Space Biosciences Outreach Lead at the NASA Ames Research Center. She is ramping into this duty slowly, as her primary duties for the next few weeks will be supporting the Fruit Fly Lab-2 experiment which is due to launch on SpaceX-11 in mid-May. Following this mission, she will be working half time on Fruit Fly Lab and half time as the Outreach Lead.

Christina Cheung received her Bachelor of Science degree in Biology from the University of California, Irvine in 2014. Soon after, she moved to San Francisco to join the Hughes-Fulford Lab in the San Francisco Veterans Affairs Medical Center as a Staff Research Associate and as a payload scientist for the T-Cell Activation Team that launched their experiment on the SpaceX CRS-5 Mission in Jan 2015. Christina then began her work as a Research Associate in the Bhattacharya Lab at NASA Ames Research Center through Blue Marble Space Institute of Science’s Young Scientist Program where she facilitated the development and optimization of experimental conditions for culturing Drosophila melanogaster in a proprietary prototype by TechShot Inc. In addition, she will be a support scientist on the upcoming Fruit Fly Lab 02 Experiment scheduled to launch on the SpaceX CRS-11 Mission in May 2017. Christina is also passionate about communicating STEM to wide audiences and will provide support to SC in her new role as a public education and outreach specialist.