Research Associate
NASA Ames Research Center
Benjamin Alva is a Research Associate in the Bioengineering Branch at NASA Ames Research Center and undergraduate honors student in Cellular and Molecular Bioengineering within the Biomedical Engineering Department with a minor in Chemistry at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities. His work has focused on synthetic cellular biology, founding the student research group STARS for collaborative space-oriented projects. He has worked with NASA for several years on projects that involved microbial preservation mechanisms of ancient Mars, sensor design for the Venus rover, and presently bioreactor development for biomanufacturing on the Moon and Mars.