Collicott set to take the helm as ASGSR president
AAE Professor Steven Collicott will transition from president-elect to president of the American Society for Gravitational and Space Research (ASGSR) during its annual meeting on Nov. 6.
Collicott will serve a one-year term as president. He then will move into the role of conference organizer. Collicott is a life member of ASGSR, previously serving as a board member from November 2015-October 2017.
Being held in Baltimore, it is Collicott’s first in-person conference since March 2019.
“I am very much looking forward to the productive conversations that are held between researchers at these events and at ASGSR, especially the mix of researchers in biological and life sciences and researchers in the physical sciences, as they relate to spaceflight or the use of spaceflight to benefit life on Earth," he said.
As a professor and researcher at Purdue, Collicott applies modeling advances, spaceflight experiments and proven zero-gravity technology from the spacecraft community to science problems and advances from science to the spacecraft community. He has unique experiences and skills in the control, gauging and modeling of liquids in the weightless conditions of spaceflight, known as “zero-gravity fluid dynamics.”
As he looks ahead to his upcoming year as president and what it will “feel like,” Collicott said he hopes to provide a different angle to the increasing news coverage of commercial spaceflights.
“While the media broadcasts broadly the exciting stories of historic commercial human spaceflight — suborbital and orbital — people should realize that each of these rockets also has an impact on science," Collicott said. "These new vehicles, supplementing NASA’s leadership in the amazing International Space Station with cheaper and simpler access to shorter duration spaceflight, are basically new microgravity science laboratories that some of us are already working in. So I see the year ahead as one that should bring an increasing appreciation, in the science communities and in our society in general, of how we are at a pivotal time in using spaceflight for research to improve living in space and on Earth.”
ASGSR, founded in 1984, represents the areas of biological and physical sciences that focus on the understanding of responses of biological and physical systems to the zero or reduced gravity encountered in space exploration. The society provides a forum to foster research, education and professional development in the multidisciplinary fields of gravitational life and physical science research.
ASGSR is devoted to furthering the field of gravitational research, its website said, by bringing together a diverse group of scientists and engineers to encourage an exchange of ideas bridging basic and applied biological and physical sciences research and technology in space and on the ground. Its members represent academic, government and industry interests.