Houston, we have a podcast. Welcome to the official podcast of the NASA Johnson Space Center,

Episode 370, Space Flight Adaptation. I'm Courtney Beasley, and I will be your host today.

On this podcast, we bring in the experts, scientists, engineers, and astronauts, all to let you know

what's going on inside the world of human spaceflight and more. From the early days of human space

flight, we have known that microgravity and being in space in general would have impacts

on the human body. Medical specialists have monitored our astronauts from the beginning,

studying how the body reacts, adapts, and changes going to space and returning to Earth.

Today we're going to talk about some of those changes and some of the practices that our flight

surgeons and other medical professionals here on the ground do to help astronauts mitigate

the impacts on the human body during human spaceflight.

And here to tell us all about it is NASA's chief health and medical officer, Dr. J. D. Polk. Let's get started.

Isn't we have a podcast. Is it we have a podcast?

All right,

Dr. Polk, welcome to Houston.

We have a podcast.

Thanks, Courtney.

Glad to be here.

We're happy to have you.

I wanted to start off by getting to know a little bit more about you. Can you tell me where you went to school? And did you always know that you wanted to be a doctor?

Well, that's a pretty loaded question. It's probably easier to tell you where I haven't gone to school. I actually, you know, I did undergrad started out in Dayton at Wright State. Actually, even before that, an associate degree in Dayton and physical therapy assisting.

And I just kind of kept working my way up the ladder, if you will.

And then did my bachelor's in science in New York.

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