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Rob is a Distinguished Professor and Director of the Astraeus Space Institute at the University of Florida. He has spent his career studying how organisms respond to extreme conditions, especially spaceflight. He and his colleagues were the first to prove that plants could grow in lunar soil collected during Apollo. Ferl recently chaired the NASEM committee on space biology research over the next decade. Rob has worked in the Arctic and Antarctica and recently went to space as a NASA-funded academic researcher to conduct an experiment on a New Shepard mission.