Esther Beltran, the director of space medicine at UCF’s Florida Space Institute, is finding ways to mitigate the effects of microgravity onf the human body and minimize the health risks of lunar dust for future moon expeditions. She hopes to inspire women through her work.

“Throughout these years I had to overcome that I was a foreigner, a woman and also considered a minority,” Beltran says. “So that was three strikes against me. And I was entering, especially back then, the male-dominated field of aerospace medicine, and a lot of the older generation had a very macho attitude.”