Beyond Earth, beyond borders: expanding education on One Health through space medicine and scientific stewardship
Honouring Drs. Funmilola Oluwafemi and Clara Richard for their commitment to planetary resilience and interstellar responsibility, hope, and hard honest work
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Quick summary: This post recognises the leadership of Drs. Clara Richard and Funmilola Oluwafemi in the fields of space medicine, human resilience, and planetary stewardship. Thanks them for having considered top leadership positions. It reflects on their respective trajectories and their potential to shape the future of One Health across extreme environments, including the biosphere, outer space, and the neglected ecological and ethical frontiers of Earth. We thank them for considering taking the helm of this global educational and research action.
Dr. Funmilola Oluwafemi is the Chief Scientific Officer at Nigeria’s National Space Research and Development Agency (NASRDA), specialising in space life sciences, microgravity research, and astrobiology. A NASA GeneLab contributor and UNOOSA collaborator, she is also the founder of Funafo Innovations, promoting education and research opportunities for women and youth in STEM across Africa.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/clararichard/
Dr. Clara Richard is Co-Founder and CEO of NeurAstra, and Researcher & Science Communicator at P/Twain, where she leads projects on human adaptation to extreme environments. Her interdisciplinary work bridges space medicine, user experience, and planetary health, advancing science communication and design in high-stakes settings.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/dr-funmilola-oluwafemi-0026bb251/
We are honored, and extend our deepest gratitude, to both space medicine doctors for being part of the EU BEACON One Health Education COST action, and for having generously considered taking on top leadership roles within the action. Their vision, integrity, and scientific excellence embody the principles this global effort stands for rigour, responsibility, and the unwavering pursuit of a healthier, more just and prepared planetary future. In a world teetering between irreversible damage and renewed hope, the work of Drs. Clara Richard and Funmilola Oluwafemi provides direction. Their will to engage with the action comes as a signal of much-needed alignment: between cutting-edge knowledge, integrity in purpose, and the planetary scale of our challenges.
It did sadden to see disrespect to your hard work and career achievements during the leadership selection process, by those ignorant who have not even contributed, nor achieved, neither aim, to do anything ever resembling your major undertakings.
Dr. Clara Richard, co-founder and CEO of NeurAstra, embodies the fusion of lived human exploration with cognitive and environmental systems design. Whether navigating a scientific road trip through the Alps or engineering experiments to study radiation’s impact on neural tissue, her work exemplifies applied foresight. Her practice reflects what One Health in the twenty-first century must entail: an unwavering commitment to human adaptability, cognitive clarity, and ecological embeddedness, all wrapped in an ethos of shared learning and critical questioning.
From remote consultancy to immersive fieldwork, from celestial observations to ergonomic design in harsh environments, Dr. Richard’s pathway is not a detour, it is the main road. By integrating neuroscience, human factors, and space systems design, she has advanced a vision of human presence that respects limits, honours diversity, and prepares rigorously for what lies ahead. Her open-ended, educational ethos, summarised in the Celestography project and the Cosmic Connections events, reflects not only her technical range but her values: inclusion, curiosity, and responsibility across domains.
Dr. Funmilola Oluwafemi, Chief Scientific Officer at the Nigerian Space Agency and a globally recognised astrobiologist, brings with her decades of scientific and institutional credibility. Her leadership in the Space Life Sciences Division, especially her work in microgravity and ecosystem preservation, directly anchors One Health in outer space and planetary biosystems alike. Her roles with UNOOSA and NASA’s Open Science Data Repository mark a clear commitment to transparency, planetary justice, and the education of future generations. Dr. Funmilola Oluwafemi is also founder and president of Funafo Innovations Promotion Foundation for Women and Youths, a hybrid NGO based in Abuja dedicated to advancing equitable access to education, research, and vocational training in space life sciences, climate-smart agriculture, and emerging technologies. The foundation actively develops curricula, mentorship programs, and capacity-building initiatives to foster scientific excellence and sustainable development among underrepresented communities.
Dr. Oluwafemi’s efforts are not only about the survival of astronauts or the mitigation of health risks. Her policy-driven scholarship, her work on curriculum development, and her foundation supporting women and youth in science are expressions of justice through science. They signal a realignment of priorities toward sustainability, equity, and global knowledge transfer. Over seventy peer-reviewed contributions, major international recognitions such as the Zonta Amelia Earhart Fellowship, and her grassroots mentoring efforts confirm her impact.
Nothing can be left to improvisation, when lives are at stake. Not one launch, nothing, no interplanetary settlement will ever succeed -including here, down to Earth- if we tolerate the ethical complacency and structural injustice that define most governance today. The stakes are not abstract. Back here, on this scarred Earth, the Amazon, once described by early European travellers as the site of sprawling civilisations, is being erased from both memory and life itself. The evidence now confirms what they saw: dense networks of human-made landscapes, forest cities, agricultural systems adapted to floodplain cycles. And yet today, with full knowledge of its unsustainable logic, we continue to burn it. We kill its people. For what? For infertile land. For commodities devoid of long-term value. For short-term extraction masquerading as development. From the Sahel to the Atlantic, we ignored records of African voyagers who reached the Americas before Europe institutionalised enslavement. Their legacy, like much of deep planetary wisdom, remains marginalised. Yet, truth, scientific, archaeological, experiential, surfaces eventually. It demands from us a different level of accountability.
Human life is fragile. Entire populations have been extinguished not by weapon or famine alone, but by microbial contact, pathogens carried unintentionally across oceans. In the first centuries of contact, up to 90% of Indigenous peoples in the Americas perished from Old World infections to which they had no immunity: smallpox, measles, influenza. This biological violence preceded and accompanied the military campaigns. But fragility was not unilateral. European settlers themselves succumbed in vast numbers to malaria, yellow fever, and unfamiliar tropical diseases. This mutual biological vulnerability became, in perverse fashion, a structural argument for the transatlantic slave trade, enslaving Africans deemed more resilient to certain diseases, to build colonies that would not otherwise survive. The massacres, the slavery, the justification of one crime through another, were never legitimate. They reveal the capacity of human systems to amplify harm under pressure, to rationalise atrocity, to evade accountability. This legacy demands confrontation, not commemoration. It calls for education, ethics, and a global commitment to prevention, not post hoc regret.
And yet, it is not knowledge that we lack. It is discipline. Resolve. Systems to implement what is already known. Nothing of value, least of all survival, is achieved without the rigor to pursue it stage by stage, across generations. No mission to the Moon, nor lasting peace on Earth, ever came from improvisation or inertia. What we face now, a destabilised climate, emerging pandemics, degraded biosphere being diminished by the day, planetary inequality, is not beyond our capacity, but beyond our current moral will. We must be strict, usparing in principle. Every child stunted today by preventable malnutrition is an engineering failure of global coordination. Every unvaccinated community, an echo of a brutal hierarchy. Every fire in the Amazon, an act of planetary vandalism we still allow. This is not the time for hesitation or soft ambition. It is the time to redesign what we mean by civilisation.
We cannot build for Venus, Mars, Europa, while we fail to protect Earth. We cannot speak of innovation if our children starve, stunted, enslaved, or abandoned. As of the latest available data, over 333 million children live in extreme poverty. Nearly 45 million suffer from wasting and 149 million from stunting. 160 million children are engaged in child labour. An estimated 244 million remain out of school. This is not an accident. It is a structural failure of planetary stewardship.
What Drs. Richard and Oluwafemi work for is the antithesis to this collapse: method, rigour, science, and global responsibility. Their experience and expertise speaks of doing things properly, never acting sloppily, never leaving decisions to improvisation. Medicine, science and engineering with foresight, educating with empathy, and ensuring the most vulnerable are never excluded from humanity’s forward motion.
It is this kind of leadership that One Health must now reflect. A leadership that spans planets, molecules, ecosystems, classrooms and governance bodies across this one planet of ours. One Health action that is humble in origin and ambitious in scope.
We are grateful, deeply, to both for considering stepping in to guide this action. And we welcome the opportunity to collaborate with minds that not only lead but listen, that not only reach but return to lift others. Our network must keep on advancing not only as a COST action, but as a strong platform for the best, a planetary undertaking, one that recognises, with uncompromising clarity, that resilience is never accidental and survival is never improvised. Just as no space mission is launched without exhaustive planning, layered redundancy, and the highest engineering precision, neither can our shared future be built on wishful thinking or piecemeal action. This action demands deliberate, staged implementation: every step laid down with care, every phase reinforced with scientific rigour, every system running in parallel, tested, and secure. We need nothing less than full-spectrum planning, global mobilisation of intellect and skill, and a refusal to accept mediocrity. All must be trained, ready, and focused, not because the path is easy, but because nothing short of excellence will sustain life, dignity, or hope on Earth or beyond. One Health, yes, but let us start counting moons, stations, biospheres yet to be inhabited or healed. Not out of hubris, but as a reminder: we must get this right, there may be far more health to safeguard than we once imagined.
 | A guest post by
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This should not be a side comment, nor an afterthought, and will indeed become a post on itself. I need to thank Dr. Yuan for also considering the top leadership position, and respectfully having to decline. My own abuses prevented the Spanish Space Medicine Chapter this action originated, from taking off. Dr. Yuan is the only one who supported this publication, all ongoing, with her own money, in a time where I barely had a roof. It all took the bandwidth away, the capacity to be delivering on the planned ahead, to focus on the importance and not dodging the next punches. It sadly was never an option, not even that moving away from the beatings. Tortured, the path here.
It affected us all, as it does to have childhoods destroyed. Time allowing, peace supporting each of our endeavours, as much as COST funding, and all income streams our global network needs to secure, the goals will get easier and easier to grab as the low hanging fruit we know those are. The aim for humanity is on regenerative medicine, rejuvenation, space exploration, moving on and living longer, fulfilling lives, enjoying. Those criminals, somehow manage to do the hardest, the simply impossible for us, indeed seem easy: to become beasts, dehumanized and allowing, forcing the others, to act inhumanly against us. None of should be happening, be allowed, be done. It is that proper education lacking, the mindset absent, we aim to bring in, what needs to be making, much sooner than later, the difference. It was urgent, it is the importance. Thankfully we can keep on, and still have such bright minds as hers, as Dr. Funmilola, Dr. Richard and Dr. Lilora to lead us.
Nos expulsan aún, tal si esa fuera su tierra. Tal como moriscas y judÃas de antaño antes de descubrir qué nuevo mundo. Encerradas, maltratadas, torturadas sin siquiera dejarnos marchar. Para todas, por la infancia, debemos ir a más. Esa naturaleza, la suya que nos somete, no deja otra opción que andar con muchÃsimo ojo, cuidarnos y asegurar, asegurar de nuevo, que todas estamos bien. Espero y deseo, trabajando todas a una, Una Salud, para que asà sea. Gracias, Dras. Ana Yuan, MarÃa Jesús Lirola, por el liderato que considerásteis y, tú, MarÃa Jesús, pudiste asumir, salvando asà nuestra acción común de tanta personalidad con bajos deseos, forzando imponerse y ocupar esa responsabilidad tal cual objeto de deseo. Ninguneando la acción misma, casi arruinándola, todas las que se acercan, acercaron y lo harán desde esa dejadez moral, esa bochornosa honra de estar sin más. Todo lo malo que es tan común, y debemos educar para prevenir, erradicar, dejar atrás de una vez y para siempre. No es un imposible, es un imperativo que está a nuestro alcanza y, ahora, también bajo nuestra tutela.