Rachael Seidler

Deputy Director

Dr. Rachael Seidler is a full professor in the departments of Applied Physiology & Kinesiology and Neurology at the University of Florida. She obtained her PhD in 1999 from Arizona State University in Kinesiology and was a postdoctoral fellow at the Brain Sciences Center at the University of Minnesota and the Minneapolis VA Medical Center. Before joining the University of Florida in 2017, Seidler was an assistant, associate, and full professor in the Departments of Psychology and Movement Science at the University of Michigan. Seidler studies co-constructive brain and behavioral changes, particularly in the realms of aging and human spaceflight. She has led several large-scale research projects funded by the NIH (U and R awards), NSF, NASA and the National Space Biomedical Research Institute (NSBRI), requiring coordination across multiple locations for longitudinal data collections. Seidler also served for several years as the NSBRI’s Sensorimotor Adaptation Team Lead, responsible for coordination and communication across all the Institute’s funded sensorimotor projects in the US. She has published close to 200 peer-reviewed manuscripts in journals such as Science, Lancet Neurology, and PNAS, with her work cited >17,000 times. Moreover, she has garnered close to $20 million in funding for her research. Her space research focuses on adaptive and dysfunctional changes to the human brain and behavior with space travel. 

Dr. Seidler’s role in the Astraeus Space Institute is to facilitate UF faculty space research success. She plans events to help faculty identify how their research fits into funding opportunities within NASA, the Translational Research Institute for Space Health (TRISH), and other national and international agencies. She also helps faculty to identify potential collaborators to move their space research forward and creates networking events to enable more cross talk and cross disciplinary collaboration. One of her major goals for the Astraeus Space Institute is to foster more synergy between aerospace engineering research at UF and biological / physiological sciences.