Women’s History Month: Patricia S. Cowings #WHM17 #WomensHistoryMonth #WomenInSTEM

Adafruit womens history 17 blog copy

Today we celebrate aerospace psychophysiologist Patricia S. Cowings, who received the National Women of Color Leadership Award in 2006. (via NASA)

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Read her full bio up on Wikipedia.

She did most of her research at NASA Ames Research Center. There she developed and patented a physiological training system called Autogenic-Feedback Training Exercise (AFTE), which enables people to learn voluntary self-control of up to 24 bodily responses in six hours. Her work was first tested in 1985 for (STS 51-b & STS 51c) Spacelab-3 and the first DOD shuttle mission. She tested her AFTE training method also on the Space J-Lab Mission (the first Japanese shuttle mission), with her work focusing on ridding of the astronaut’s motion sickness.[1][3] Later she trained four cosmonauts to control both motion sickness and low blood pressure after six-months in space aboard the MIR space station. She found success, and continued to teach people how to control motion sickness, improve performance of search & rescue pilots, and reduce symptoms of several patient populations suffering from nausea, dizziness and fainting. She has helped author several publications with her husband, William B. Toscano. They have a son, Christopher Michael Cowings Toscano, who traveled with them as they trained space crews.

Read more.


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