On Jan. 29, 2026, the University of Pittsburgh Health Sciences announced the launch of the Trivedi Institute for Space and Global Biomedicine, one of the first dedicated institutes focused on applying insights from spaceflight to improve human health on Earth.

The $25 million institute will be led by Kate Rubins, who joined Pitt in October as professor of computational and systems biology, after a 16-year career as a NASA astronaut that included two long-duration missions and a total of 300 days in space. She was the first person to sequence DNA in space and led multiple investigations in genomics and human health under extreme conditions.

Through the Trivedi Family Foundation, Ashok Trivedi, a Pittsburgh-based entrepreneur, investor and philanthropist, will be the new institute’s major donor. He believes the cutting-edge research facilitated through the institute and its world-class team will help define a new frontier of science that bridges human health on Earth and in space.

The institute’s leadership brings broad expertise across physics, medicine, spaceflight, synthetic biology, engineering and entrepreneurship.

The initiative will train the next generation of scientists, clinicians and entrepreneurs at the intersection of space biology, biomedicine and translational health, with missions and projects planned into the 2030s.