From SNOLAB to Orbit: Multi-Omics and Payload Design for Deep Space
"Space exploration begins within us."
What happens to life when you remove radiation entirely, and what does that tell us about surviving deep space? To engineer biology for the stars, we have to understand it at its most fundamental level, by exploring the absolute extremes of the radiation spectrum.
Welcome to Week 3 - The Micro-Frontier: From Extremophiles to Biology-on-a-Chip.
Join us for an operational masterclass titled "From SNOLAB to Orbit: Multi-Omics and Payload Design for Deep Space," featuring Jaume Puig, Space Radiobiologist, PhD Researcher at SNOLAB, and NASA GeneLab Analysis Working Group Member.
Jaume will take us from the sub-background "silence" of one of the world's deepest underground laboratories straight into the high-flux radiation environments of low Earth orbit. He will break down how he leverages genomics, transcriptomics, and multi-omics data processing to decode how organisms adapt to these radical stressors. Moving from data to physical engineering, discover how automated continuous culture systems and bioreactors are designed to withstand rocket launches, how NASA GeneLab standardises open-science space biology, and how these insights are fueling stealth-mode space biotech ventures targeting sustainable resource extraction off-world.
What you’ll learn:
The Sub-Background Silence: Why studying biology 2 kilometers underground at SNOLAB provides the ultimate baseline control for understanding cosmic radiation damage.
Payload Architecture: How to translate complex biological protocols into automated, modular bioreactors certified for International Space Station (ISS) flight readiness.
The NASA Data Engine: How open-science pipelines, data reanalysis, and standardised omics workflows are democratizing space biology research globally.
Whether you are a bioinformatician looking to work with spaceflight datasets, a hardware engineer building for orbit, or an entrepreneur interested in space resource extraction, this session will give you the practical blueprint.
🎤 About the speaker
Jaume Puig - Space Radiobiologist & PhD Researcher, SNOLAB / NASA GeneLab
Jaume Puig is a space biotechnologist and systems radiobiologist operating at the intersection of extreme-environment life sciences, payload engineering, and bioinformatics. He is currently a PhD Researcher in Biomolecular Sciences (Radiation Biology) at Laurentian University conducting research at SNOLAB, one of the world's deepest underground laboratories, where he coordinates the Global Underground Yeast (GUY) project to assess low-background radiation effects.
Jaume’s extensive space sector track record includes serving as the Communications Coordinator for the NASA GeneLab Microbes Analysis Working Group, where he actively co-authors methods papers and helps standardise omics pipelines for the open-science community. He has previously engineered automated ISS payloads as a space biotechnology technician for Yuri and analysed commercial astronaut datasets for the Space Omics and Medical Atlas (SOMA) framework. Outside of academia, Jaume is the CTO and co-founder of a stealth-mode space biotechnology startup focused on developing biological technologies for sustainable resource extraction in deep space environments.