Graham Shunk, a high school senior from North Carolina and exchange alumnus of the National Security Languages Initiative for Youth (NLSI-Y) program, is currently a finalist for NASA’s Grow Beyond Earth competition and has designed one of 5 winning prototypes of dense-agriculture systems for sustainably growing food in microgravity.
Graham has spent the past few years researching one of the most pressing questions in developing space travel to Mars: how do you protect astronauts from exposure to the Van Allen belts? These two swaths of intense radiation held around Earth by its magnetic field pose a life-threatening problem for astronauts engaging in extended space exploration.
Click here to continue reading about how NSLI-Y alumnus Graham Shunk plans to utilize his Russian language skills professionally.