Norbert Kraft, MD, received "The NASA Group Achievement Award 2013," one of the most prestigious awards a group can receive, presented to selected groups who have distinguished themselves by making outstanding contributions to the NASA mission. In 2010, Kraft received the 2010 Award for "Outstanding Accomplishments in the Psychological and Psychiatric Aspects of Aerospace Medicine."
He has over 20 years of experience in aviation and aerospace research and development. His primary area of expertise is developing physiological and psychological countermeasures to combat the negative effects of long-duration spaceflight. Dr. Kraft's experiences span Europe, Asia, and the United States, where he has worked for several international space agencies, including the Russian Space Agency and the Japanese Space Agency. Dr. Kraft is an author of over 40 papers in the field of aerospace medicine, including a seminal paper on intercultural crew issues in long-duration spaceflight. He has an M.D. from University of Vienna, Austria, and is a Fellow of the Aerospace Medical Association.
Dr. James R. Kass has been working in the field of human spaceflight for more than 30 years. He was an investigator on the first Spacelab mission in the early 80s in the field of neurophysiology. In the decade following, he gained industrial experience at several aerospace companies in Germany, before joining the European Space Agency at its research and technology centre, ESTEC, in the Netherlands.
Dr. Kass has trained astronauts and worked on the ground operations teams for several Spacelab /Space Shuttle and MIR missions (including the tragic STS-107), with crews from Russia, USA, Middle and Far East, and several European countries. He has also worked with cosmonauts of the former Salyut space station and astronauts of the first US space station, Skylab. He has participated as scientist and reviewer in several isolation experiments investigating psychology of long-duration isolation, as one will certainly encounter on Mars.
Dr. Raye Kass, Professor of Applied Human Sciences at Concordia University, Montreal, Canada, currently spearheads group theory courses in both the undergraduate and graduate level. Dr. Kass has been highlighted frequently by both national and international press agencies for both her space sciences and group theory research. Dr. Kass has also been invited to be involved in numerous space research projects in conjunction with the Canadian Space Agency and NASA, including the Psychological Experiment / Training Programme for the CAPSULS Mission held in Canada, the SFINCCS mission held in Russia, and the NSBRI (National Space Biomedical Research Institute) Ground-based Research Project with the NASA Ames Research Centre in the USA.
Dr. Kass is the author of
Theories of Small Group Development, as well as the coauthor of three other books on group theory.
