- Graduate Research Assistant | Harvard University
Laboratory for Neuroimaging & Integrative Physiology
- B.S., Psychology | Sweet Briar College, 2018
- M.S., Cognitive Neuroscience | Harvard University, 2021
Jona Cumani has done some serious thinking about life on Mars. As a graduate student studying cognitive neuroscience at Harvard University, she has explored the challenges of bringing human life to the faraway planet. She now has a NASA grant to research the psychological and neurological impact of space travel.
Jona Cumani has done some serious thinking about life on Mars. As a graduate student studying cognitive neuroscience at Harvard University, she has explored the challenges of bringing human life to the faraway planet. Jona now has a NASA grant to research the psychological and neurological impact of space travel.
Put simply, isolation and unfiltered exposure to the sun’s rays can affect an astronaut’s mental wellbeing. So can the lack of gravity, which alters blood flow and can lead to swelling in an astronaut’s face. This swelling, in turn, can contribute to vision problems and make it harder for others to discern facial expressions or read social cues, leading to social anxiety.
“We’re working out ways with NASA and top physicians and scientists around the world in understanding how we can send humans to space for long durations of time and have it be feasible for them to continue on and populate other planets,” says Jona, Class of 2018.
A Ph.D. candidate at Harvard, Jona works as a research assistant at a laboratory at Massachusetts General Hospital, doing studies that will form the basis of her dissertation. Her work builds off her psychology degree at Sweet Briar. But that’s not all she took from her college experience. “The confidence from Sweet Briar really comes into play,” she says. “I’ve been able to speak my mind a lot of times and still am speaking my mind a lot. “
In addition to her research work and dissertation, Jona is starting her own business consulting on the neuroscience of hospitality. She advises restaurants on such factors as where to place items on the menu—the righthand corner is the first place people look—and how servers should approach customers. “I do the psychology of human behavior when dining,” she says. “If the space is darker, you eat slower. If the music is louder, you drink more.”
Jona hopes to continue her aerospace research, but says she is skeptical about the likelihood of colonizing Mars anytime soon. The journey to the red planet takes seven to nine months, while the neurological effects of space travel become unbearable in six to eight months. “It’s extremely difficult for us to bring humans from Earth to Mars, one because we don’t have the ability to bring them back. Two, we’re not psychologically adapted for this. And three, they just wouldn’t make it.”