Mehta earns grants from National Academies, NASA

Ranjana Mehta, a professor of industrial and systems engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, will use two new grants to address worker fatigue in the offshore energy sector and study the neural effects of spaceflight on astronauts.

The research projects are funded by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine’s Gulf Research Program (GRP) and NASA, respectively.

Mehta’s GRP project, supported by a $1.2 million grant, aims to create a decision-support tool to gauge and manage worker fatigue risks based on stakeholder input. After developing the tool, Mehta’s group plans to implement and assess its effectiveness in partnership with offshore energy industry partners.

Her NASA-sponsored research, funded by a $150,000 grant, seeks to characterize the effects of cognitive overload, sleep deprivation, altered gravity environments and other stressors on space flight crew members’ sensorimotor functions and the underlying neural responses.

As the inaugural NASA inclusion, diversity, equity, accessibility and space exploration (ideas) faculty fellow in 2022, Mehta spent a summer at the agency’s Johnson Space Center in Houston.