Steven Yule, PhD
Steven Yule, PhD, of the Neil and Elise Wallace STRATUS Center for Medical Simulation, led one of 10 proposals selected by NASA’s Human Research Program. This prestigious award will contribute to NASA’s long-term plans, which include crewed missions to the Moon and Mars, by investigating how crew members perform together in a research environment to resolve simulated medical emergencies during spaceflight.
The research will take place over the next year in a spacecraft simulator housed at the STRATUS Center and was developed by the research team in a previous NASA-funded study. Yule will collaborate with BWH colleagues Charles Pozner, MD, executive director of the STRATUS Center; Jamie Robertson, PhD, MPH, assistant director of Simulation-Based Learning at STRATUS; and Douglas Smink, MD, MPH, program director of General Surgery Residency, in addition to Thomas Doyle, PhD, MESc, of McMaster University, and David Musson, MD, of Northern Ontario School of Medicine.
Yule holds graduate degrees in both psychology and engineering, and leads a research program investigating how team nontechnical skills, such as leadership situation awareness and teamwork, influence performance and safety in health care. His NASA-funded projects follow a long track record of surgical research involving simulation and training to improve quality and safety of patient care.
NASA’s Human Research program works to address the practical problems of spaceflight that affect astronaut health, and its research may provide knowledge and technologies that could improve human health and performance during space exploration and aid the development of potential countermeasures for problems experienced during space travel.
