Study Team
The study team of the DLR consists of employees with expertise in the fields of clinical research, management, neurology, nutrition, and biology. It supports internal and external human studies at the DLR and conducts its own scientific projects.
The team participates, among other things, in long-term bed rest and isolation studies for the space agencies ESA and NASA at :envihab, conducts nutrition studies in collaboration with Charité or hypoxia studies with various university partners. In addition, the study team plans and implements outpatient studies on a short-arm human centrifuge to develop new countermeasures for safe space missions. It also coordinates the National Centrifuge Program, which allows external researchers to use the short-arm human centrifuge for various scientific analyses, such as perception of the body in three-dimensional space during changes in gravity.
In the field of neuroscience and clinical neurology, the study team collaborates with various institutions, including the Department of Neurology at the University Hospital Bonn, the German Center for Neurodegenerative Diseases (DZNE), the Dementia Research Institute at University College London, the Department of Neurology at the University Hospital Aachen, different scientific working groups at the University Hospital Bonn, as well as the Departments of Cardiovascular Aerospace Medicine and Sleep and Human Factors research at the Institute of Aerospace Medicine. The projects include clinical neurological examinations, orthostatic tests, cognitive tests, brain imaging techniques, sleep studies, and biomarker analyses of patients with neurological diseases and participants of various studies at the institute.
Furthermore, the nutrition team within the study team develops standardized menus and nutrition concepts for outpatient and inpatient studies. These often take into account 32 different nutrients, which are maintained within precise nutritional limits for each individual and according to the study days. Additionally, the team collaborates with internal and external researchers to analyze nutrition scientific data.