Annie Wargetz

Annie Wargetz is a passionate space cadet who is currently a graduate student working towards a Master of Science in Space Studies at the University of North Dakota. She is focusing on the history, policy, psychology, and physiology of human spaceflight and will be defending her thesis in the spring on how to select and train a crew for a long-duration planetary mission. She is a research assistant in the Human Spaceflight Laboratory at UND and volunteers as the Fundraising and Outreach Coordinator for the UND Observatory. She also recently accepted the role of Advisor for the Astrosociology Research Institute and has joined the Outreach Committee at UND’s chapter of the American Meteorological Society. Annie has presented her poster on crew accommodations design for the Human Spaceflight Laboratory’s Planetary Exploration Initiative at several conferences, including the recent North Dakota EPSCoR conference. Annie gained more than eight years of experience in education/public speaking in the software industry before deciding to pursue her dreams of a career in space and its related industries. Prior to that, Annie graduated from the University of Houston with a Bachelor of Arts in Communication, where she focused on corporate communications, public relations, and advertising and minored in mathematics. Annie speaks English, French, and Spanish and hopes to someday soon be fluent in Russian, and also aspires to become the next “Carl Sagan” who gets the public excited about space once again. You can find Annie on Twitter as @SETIgal1124.This summer, Annie worked with Dr. Vadim Rygalov at the UND Department of Space Studies to research the effects of food and nutrition on human performance levels in extreme isolated and confined environments, the topic for which she is present on today’s show.