It's really exciting, to be honest. As a curious person and a psychologist by training, I always notice psychological processes going on between people. This interpersonal aspect, especially in teams, has always been curious to me. Now being able to see teams who work in space analog environments (like analog space stations and polar environments since we use these as analogs to space) and apply this skill of noticing those processes and seeing what is off and where, is amazing. Being in contact with my participants, since I mainly do qualitative research, also adds to this amazingness because everyone who has been in these environments knows how important psychological aspects are there. Thus people are interested in sharing their experiences and points of few for the sake of safer and better space travel. But overall, what we do in the lab and what I do with my research is that we have this understanding of the state of the literature regarding teamwork in space and then we try to figure out what are the main unresolved issues. For example, a few years ago I noticed from the data and astronaut speeches that emotions and emotion regulation are not paid attention to too much. And they are SO important. So I pivoted my whole research interest into that direction, combining my background in clinical psychology and my current training in organizational psychology. And now, my aim is to see what are the emotions-related challenges in human space flight and what should we do to solve them. And it's even more exciting when I've had the chance to be part of those space analog missions myself. I've done a mission at the Mars Desert Research Station, in Utah, USA, another at LunAres Research Station in Poland, and then early 2025, I spent three weeks on King George Island, Antarctica, to study teamwork and collaboration in the White Continent. And studying these aspects and being part of those teams, getting an insight into how it is actually to experience these contexts and live these experiences has been just amazing.

My journey hasn't been very straightforward. After high school, like most fresh high school graduates, I had no clue what to do with my life. I went traveling for 6 months, did a few odd jobs, studied a year in med school, got kicked out of acting school, and ended up in psychology, which was my third and last choice because I really had no other options at that point. But something about psychology really fit me - maybe it was the fact that it wasn't so demanding, and I had the chance to continue working in bars and volunteering around my town. Maybe it was something else, who knows. I didn't even really plan to go to do a Master's, but it fit my life situation after I got my BA, so I decided to just do a clinical psych master's, why not? I was actually interested in educational psychology at that time since I had started a teaching job. But then, in the Autumn of my first semester in the clinical MA program, a friend of mine, a physicist, mentioned that he was applying to European Space Agency internships. And I had been fascinated by space my whole life. And him telling me that clicked something in my head, and I thought - but they need psychologists in space as well. There are people there, so we need to do psychology research too. So oblivious to the fact that people doing that research existed, in my ESA internship application, I wrote up a description of a space psychologist - a job that really made my eyes glimmer with excitement. Well, I got rejected for that position, but this whole experience gave me some hope for some reason. I think I just felt that I had found my passion. The question was, could I actually do it? Was it possible in Estonia, in a country where there was no space agency and no one in the country was working on anything similar? I googled 'space psychologists' and emailed the first three people who came up. One of them, a professor from Portugal, Pedro Marques-Quinteiro, replied to me and decided that he wanted to support me in my endeavor of doing a master's thesis on space psychology. Fast forward six years, and we are good friends and collaborators :) He opened the door for me to this world, gave me great tips and guidance, and opened his connections to me. At the same time, I was frantically looking for options for social scientists/psychologists in the space sector and found an internship in Belgium and then one at ESA. Then I got a PhD position in the United States at Dr. Shawn Burke's lab, where for the fourth year, I've been working on NASA-funded projects that aim to support long-duration space missions. And I really love my job, and I still think I have really found my ikigai, my purpose.

That question always makes me a bit shy because I feel I have this little child's dream. But heck, I got to here where I am from Estonia and have received my own NASA grants by now... I think my friends thought I was nuts already when I dreamt about being here where I am right now. So let's dream big, shall we? So the story goes that over the next decades, we'll have permanent colonies on the Moon and Mars, hopefully, right? The more people you have, the harder it gets to manage them and maintain psychologically safe environments. As the general Antarctica experience shows us. So it would be really helpful to have a psychologist, not a clinical one, but a teamwork or organizational psychologist in one of those colonies, who could support the commanders to keep things together and at the same time perhaps do some research and monitoring of teamwork challenges and would help to solve them. Would be neat, huh?