Gene Technology

Parag A Vaishampayan

Parag A Vaishampayan
Jet Propulsion Laboratory
California Institute of Technology, USA

Biography

As a staff scientist, he has support to a multifunctional, multidisciplinary, biotechnology–based laboratory. His major emphasis is on characterizing the microbial diversity of communities associated with spacecraft outbound from Earth and the clean-room facilities in which they are assembled. He have applied my scientific expertise and bioinformatics knowledge to decipher the microbial ecology of diverse and extreme environmental niches encompassing spacecraft assembly clean rooms, stratospheric air samples, high altitude caves, hydrothermal vents and human gut to name few. He is the main bioinformatician for group at JPL for the generation and curation of a comprehensive sequence database. A significant advantage of this database is its application to industries and disciplines outside of astrobiology in particular, and NASA in general. Instrumental in designing and managing, he is developing a computational model for Predictive risk assessment of spacecraft contamination based on this database.

Research Interest

PMA-Microarray to measure viable bacterial population, Resistance of Spacecraft Isolates to Outer Space for Planetary Protection Purposes, Predictive Risk Assessment of Spacecraft Contamination with Computational Modeling, Genomic inventory of spacecraft associated components of Mars missions: Mars Planetary Protection-JPL.