WHO WE ARE

Propagule was founded by Christine Escobar and Jane Shevtsov.

Bioastronautics engineer Christine Escobar has a dual background in ecology and aerospace systems engineering, with expertise in space agriculture, information systems (including database design, data mining, analytics, and machine learning), and robust design for quality engineering. Prior to entering the space industry, Christine was a leader in public health emergency preparedness, providing planning, training, and assessment of readiness for public health disasters and bioterrorism. She then became a Mission Manager and systems engineer for the NASA Sounding Rocket Operations Contract, where she led teams of engineers and technicians through the life cycle of fourteen sounding rocket missions.

In 2016, Christine co-founded Space Lab® with the mission of advancing human space exploration through research and technology development. As Space Lab’s Vice President, she has led business administration, business development, and quality assurance and provided systems engineering and analysis support. She is Principal Investigator for several R&D projects, including µG-LilyPond™ - a floating plant production system for microgravity, MarsOasis® - a hydroponic Martian greenhouse, HEART – an autonomous space habitat health management tool, and PHILM™ - regenerative CO2 control for plant habitats.

As a Space Habitat Systems Engineer, Christine is passionate about sustainable, Earth-independent solutions for human space exploration. She is conducting PhD research in the robust design of controlled ecological life support systems at the University of Colorado at Boulder and is currently investigating duckweed (family Lemnaceae) for use as a nutritious space crop. She also played an active role in needs assessments for bioregenerative life support research and co-organized the first global Space Ecology Workshop in 2022.

Systems ecologist Jane Shevtsov, Ph.D. has expertise in ecosystem modeling and analysis. She majored in Ecology, Behavior and Evolution at UCLA, where she was also an active member of the Astrobiology Society. She then attended the University of Georgia for her PhD, which she finished in 2012. Her research focused on on the flows of energy and nutrients in ecosystems and as part of it, she developed a new computational algorithm for tracing indirect flows in nonequilibrium systems.

Having always been fascinated by space, she had the good fortune to intern twice at Kennedy Space Center’s Space Life Sciences Lab. Her first project there, as an undergrad, studied the potential of fungi to degrade volatile organic air contaminants. Her second, as a grad student, looked at the dynamics of waste processing bioreactors.

After her Ph.D., Jane returned to UCLA and started working on a new math course that introduces first-year life science students to mathematical modeling, nonlinear dynamics and programming. This course is now taught to over a thousand students every year. She co-authored an award-winning textbook, Modeling Life: The
Mathematics of Biological Systems. Currently, she teaches these courses and statistics at UCLA.

In 2018-2019, Jane was a co-PI with Robert Skelton, Anthony Longman and Joel Sercel on NIAC Phase II expandable habitat report, outlining a design for a bioregenerative life support system. She then received a NIAC Phase I award for the idea of using fungi to make soil from asteroid regolith. She has also played an active role in needs assessments for bioregenerative life support research and co-organized 2022’s Global Space Ecology Workshop.