Going to Extremes
For Adrienne Kish (Ph.D. ’07, cell biology and molecular genetics), dreams of ‘doing biology in space’ are becoming a reality with an upcoming mission to the International Space Station.
When it comes to her work in microbiology, Adrienne Kish (Ph.D. ’07, cell biology and molecular genetics) has always believed in going to extremes. As an associate professor at the National Museum of Natural History in Paris and an expert scientist for the European Space Agency, Kish studies organisms that thrive in extreme Earth environments where humans can’t survive.
“In my research, I have been looking at different extremophiles—organisms that live in what we consider as humans the most hostile environments—with high levels of salt, radiation, very high temperatures or low pH—and these microbes, they love these environments, it’s exactly where they want to be,” Kish explained. “I wanted to figure out why. What was so special about them at a molecular level? Why can they thrive there, and we can't?”
Kish also has a bigger question: if these extremophiles can survive in hostile environments on Earth, what about the extremes of space? Next year, as part of a project called Exocube, she and other European space scientists hope to investigate how microorganisms that can withstand the most extreme environments on Earth will respond to conditions beyond Earth’s atmosphere.
“It’s a really big moment—for the first time, we're going to take different microbes and try to have them grow outside the International Space Station. We’ll expose them to space radiation and then we're going to inject their growth solution with an automated system to rehydrate them and watch and see if they can grow,” Kish explained. “We’ll also be looking at dead microorganisms exposed to radiation—the kind of radiation we don't have on Earth—and find out if we can analyze them with our instruments and say if it used to be something living. This will help us understand the origins of life and how space radiation can degrade potential signs of life in the universe.”
The hope is that these groundbreaking experiments can help unravel some of the deepest mysteries of space.
“We're trying to answer the really basic questions of existence: are we alone in the universe? Were we always alone in the universe? Was there ever life in the past that isn't alive anymore,” Kish said. “These are really fundamental questions about biology and what it means to be alive. But they're incredibly difficult to answer.”
Finding her niche in biology
Always fascinated by science and space growing up, Kish’s undergraduate studies took her to the University of Victoria in British Columbia, where she hoped to find her niche in biology.
“I tried out different kinds of biology and I really thought I'd go into plant genetics because that tied in well with the space program and the plan to study how to support long-term human habitation in space. And I realized after doing some internships that I don't have the patience for that. I don't like waiting for plants to grow,” Kish explained. “I ended up going into microbiology and that’s when I realized that this is what I wanted to do.”
After graduating in 2001, Kish landed an internship with NASA at the Kennedy Space Center, working in the space shuttle program, an interesting—and sometimes messy—assignment that continued to fuel her interest in the science of space.
“After the space shuttle landed, I was supposed to get the wet garbage off of it—it sounds very romantic, right? I was sampling it to see the microbial diversity and see if there were pathogens in there that could make the astronauts sick,” Kish recalled. “At the time, I thought I really wanted to do work like this, but I needed to find out more.”
In 2002, inspired by her NASA experience and her dreams of her future as a scientist, Kish traveled to Strasbourg, France, to begin her master’s at the International Space University (ISU), realizing she still had a lot to learn.
“I wanted to do biology in space, and this is a really odd thing because you can't just take an entire lab into space,” Kish explained. “You've got to have hardware design, so I realized I had to learn engineering. I even had to learn how to build equipment that could fly into space. And how do you even get access to space? I decided to go to the International Space University because I really needed to figure out how to do these things.”
A game-changing internship at UMD
While studying at ISU, Kish found a game-changing six-month internship in the University of Maryland’s Department of Cell Biology and Molecular Genetics, an experience that helped set the stage for Kish’s research for years to come. During the internship, she studied halophiles—extremophiles that thrive in high concentrations of salt.
“Halophile literally means salt-loving, and we’re interested in the halophiles because you can find the same kind of salt that we have all over Earth on other planets,” Kish explained. “You find the same type of salt on Mars, you can find it on some of the icy moons of Saturn and Jupiter, and they’ve found it in some other large bodies that are the size of asteroids. So that makes them interesting targets for survival in space.”
Kish’s internship at Maryland paved the way for her Ph.D. research studying halophiles, their recovery mechanisms and the effects of radiation.
“We were looking at what kind of damage was induced by gamma radiation, how they were able to repair that damage to survive, and what was special about these organisms that let them do this,” Kish said. “Maryland had such a unique setup—we could come in with our samples and have the radiation source that we needed and then immediately go into analyzing what had happened to the cells and to our microorganisms immediately after radiating them. That was really useful, and there are not many places you can go that have that. Some of the professors on my Ph.D. committee—Caren Chang and Charles Delwiche and Steve Mount—are still at UMD today.”
After earning her Ph.D. in 2007, Kish did postdoctoral research at the Carnegie Institution for Science, Paris-Sud University and the Sorbonne before joining the National Museum of Natural History in Paris as an associate professor in 2014. A contributor to numerous published studies and scientific papers, Kish joined the European Space Agency Life Sciences Working Group in 2024 and continues to focus on Earth’s most resilient extremophiles, looking ahead to bigger questions about life beyond our planet.
“My research in space science focuses on different extremophiles because, for now, we only know life on Earth,” Kish explained. “There’s this way to look at the science where you imagine what could be in space, but you have to ground it in what is known about life on Earth. And that really informs how I do my science now.”
Looking back, Kish realizes that her time at UMD has had a bigger impact on her work than she could have anticipated.
“Interestingly enough, the work I'm doing right now came full circle right back to what I had done during my Ph.D.,” Kish reflected. “And I came back to that now because over that span of time, the science evolved, the techniques got better and we were finally able to answer some of the questions we thought about during my Ph.D. Looking back, that time at Maryland helped set the stage for the path I’m on now.”
With the Exocube project set to take her experiments to space just months from now, Kish is grateful for how far her research has taken her and excited about the discoveries ahead.
“For me, this is going to be really huge, literally a dream come true—these halophiles that I'm studying, we're going to be flying them on the International Space Station at the end of this year,” Kish said. “This is what I was always dreaming about as a kid—to actually have something that I worked on going up in space—and it’s already exactly as good as I imagined it would be. It’s going to be really amazing.”