Profile: Morningside Academy for Design Fellow Allison Porter

via MIT Morningside Academy for Design on Instagram

“I’m continually inspired by how humans and humanity have a constant desire to explore. And we, as humans, continually come up with solutions to overcome any hurdle that stands in the way of better understanding our world or the universe.” — Allison Porter 

2023 Morningside Academy for Design Fellow and AeroAstro PhD student Allison Porter (Human Systems Lab) is integrating automation for better health for people in spaceflight. She is now developing the Automation Framework for Exploration Medicine (AFEM) to guide the integration of automation into exploration medical capabilities, making these missions successfully autonomous at mission-critical moments.

Also a NASA Johnson Space Center Graduate Pathways Co-Op student, Allison has designed experiments to test novel devices to monitor and assess human performance in spaceflight, an increasingly important need as NASA Artemis returns human explorers to the moon.

From Nebraska, Allison previously completed her S.B. in Biological Systems Engineering at University of Nebraska–Lincoln. After completing her SM in Course 16, Allison is pursuing her PhD in Bioastronautics with the joint Harvard-MIT Health Science Program which is the academic unit of the MIT Institute for Medical Engineering and Science. Her work in exploration medicine serves to lead the future of human health in remote and extreme environments.