By SUSAN JONES

Pitt’s new Trivedi Institute for Space and Global Biomedicine will be focused on “one of the audacious future directions for health and biomedical research,” Anantha Shekhar, senior vice chancellor for health sciences said at an event announcing the institute on Jan. 29.

The institute is funded with a $25 million joint investment from the Trivedi Family Foundation plus University funding. The foundation was started by Ashok Trivedi, a Pittsburgh-based entrepreneur, investor and philanthropist, after he sold the tech company IGATE.

The center will be led by Kate Rubins, who came to Pitt in October as a professor of computational and systems biology after a a 16-year career as a NASA astronaut that included two long-duration missions and a total of 300 days in space. Shekhar said Rubins had offers from five top universities when she left NASA, and chose Pitt.

“This is a place to get science done,” Rubins said.

“I debated for a little while about wearing the astronaut jacket, but then I realized, you’re not really an astronaut, unless you wear the jacket,” she said at the news conference. “So I took it out especially for you.”

Rubins said one of the things space flight makes very clear, “is that it’s a very extreme biological environment. We have microgravity, radiation and limited resources which force the human body and biological systems to adapt quickly.

“We see bone loss accelerating. We see muscle weakness, sarcopenia and we see immune systems degrade. … At the same time, recovery can be very quick once you come back to Earth. So that combination — the rapid onset and the recovery in otherwise very healthy people — gives us a powerful window into aging, chronic disease and resilience.”

In addition, the institute will study resilient medical and biological systems that work when resources are limited, whether that’s in space, in rural medicine, in disaster response or other austere environments.

For instance, the only diagnostic equipment available in space is ultrasound, but, of course, there are no ultrasound technicians in space. “So we learn to do our own ultrasound with a professional clinical guidance team on the ground,” Rubins said. “And I think this is incredibly exciting if you’re thinking about remote medicine elsewhere in the world where you don’t have specialized technicians.”

She said they want to make sure that the discoveries they make can actually turn into diagnostics, therapeutics and tools that can actually be used. One of the guiding principles of the institute, she said, is, “What we learn when humans leave Earth should benefit the people who stay here.”

Chris Mason, a genomics researcher and space biologist who will serve as deputy director of the center, noted that much of space research has been concentrated in areas like Cape Canaveral, Fla., and in Texas and California.

“We really envision this institute being the hub that connects a lot of areas across the Northeast for technology development and space medicine, but especially getting these tools, not just working at the bench or even nanotubes, … but getting these technologies to work for the broader environment, and to get entrepreneurship also supported.”

That includes connecting with the next generation of scientists, clinicians and entrepreneurs through fellowships and other programs.

Rubins and Mason first met around 2012 and have been involved in numerous projects together, including the landmark Twins Study that looked at the physiological, molecular and cognitive changes could happen to a human from exposure to spaceflight by comparing retired astronaut Scott Kelly while he was in space, to his identical twin brother, retired astronaut Mark Kelly.

Trivedi’s inspiration

Ashok Trivedi said there were three reasons he decided to become the founding donor to the Institute for Space and Global Biomedicine. It also helped that he has had a long-standing relationship with Pitt’s Anantha Shekhar.

“First of all, I firmly believe biological sciences are going to be the defining science of the 21st century,” he said at the news conference. In addition, he believes the biggest beneficiary of generative AI is biological sciences, which has already helped researchers speed up “the drug discovery process from 10 years to one year, and bring down the cost tremendously.”

He noted that physics, which he studied for eight years in college, “powered the industrial revolution, computer revolution, internet and information age, … but ever since the human genome was cracked in early 2000s, I believe the biological sciences are moving on steroids. … I believe physics has reached a level of creative maturity, while at the same time, biological sciences are bubbling with youthful excitement.”

His second reason was the “world-class scientific team is already in place.” He’s previously experienced the difficulty in finding an initial scientific team for a new institute, but said that having Rubins and Mason means they won’t have to spend two years building that team. They will be joined by two professors from the School of Medicine: Afshin Beheshti, professor of surgery and director of the Space Biomedicine Program for Pitt Space, and Sylvain Costes, professor of radiation oncology, who will lead the Center for Space Biomanufacturing, Synthetic Biology and Digital Health at the institute.

Trivedi’s third reason is more personal.

“Pittsburgh has been my home for about 50 years,” he said. “The city welcomed me, challenged me, and shaped me to become an entrepreneur. … I deeply felt that I should give back to Pittsburgh and give back to the community out here,” just as he has done in his native India.

After selling IGATE and setting up the foundation with “tens of millions of dollars,” he decided to focus his philanthropy on biological sciences. This included co-founding Ashoka University in India and funding the Trivedi School of Biological Sciences there.

Growing space research at Pitt

Pitt launched its Space Initiative in 2024, and this new institute hopes to build on that.

Beheshti said since then there’s been growing interest from professors in the School of Medicine and the Swanson School of Engineering, and more people are applying for grants from NASA.

Pitt Space is still very active, Rubins said, and the new institute will collaborate with them. But while the Trivedi Institute will focus on biomedicine, the Space Initiative also works on things like satellites, computation and geology, which is outside the work of the institute.

Rubins said they will partner with NASA through a Space Act Agreement. “That won’t just be flying things in space,” she said. “That’s sharing knowledge back and forth, transfer of information, potentially using some of the NASA test facilities, although Sylvain is also going to be building some test facilities here. And then we’re also interested beyond NASA, in working with the commercial companies. And so we have started to sign agreements with several of the commercial companies to be able to fly our experiments to space.”

Sylvain Costes said “one of the concepts is we really want to create a facility that has multiple facets.” This includes two kinds of environmental chamber. One will mimic what is at the International Space Station or on any human habitat. “That means there is still oxygen, there is still carbon dioxide, but there’s also a constant production of radiation. …

“That chamber will be unique,” he said. “There is nothing in the world right now that would have this combination. That was a gap, actually, that we had identified in NASA years ago, and it was very difficult to push this concept. So I want to finish this concept here.”

He also wants to work with companies to build a vacuum chamber, “where we actually can mimic the moon and Mars. We will bring regolith, which is the dirt that you find on the moon and Mars, and also will bring radiation there. This will be a test bed for bringing equipment or hardware being developed by Pitt engineering. We really want to partner with Pitt engineering to bring this hardware into those vacuum seal chambers and really test things in a way that we could not do before.”

Lastly, he’s envisioning a room “where we basically replicate the racking system (to organize, power and cool scientific payloads) of these stations, because there are a bunch of commercial stations coming online, we want to work with them to understand their requirements and their engineering blueprints so we can have a rack system that is compatible to what they have.”

“I think this is just one of the most exciting times in space if you’re looking to launch experiments,” Rubins said.

Susan Jones is editor of the University Times. Reach her at suejones@pitt.edu or 724-244-4042.

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