Photo courtesy of NASA.

Last winter, Adele Luta (GRS ’04) spent two months in Costa Rica as a visiting professor at the Latin American University of Science and Technology. She led seminars on entrepreneurship and technology commercialization, as you would expect a STEP graduate to do. But she also taught an astronomy course devoted to stars, solar systems and space flight. At every stage of her career, she has shown a penchant for exploration.

As a physics major in college, Luta won a fellowship at Kennedy Space Center in Florida, where she worked on science experiments to be conducted on the space shuttle. She was thinking of going on for a doctorate when she heard about Case Western Reserve’s physics entrepreneurship program. Luta quickly recognized the value of the skills imparted by the program, even for someone contemplating an academic career. “I had seen a lot of researchers struggle with industry interactions and grant funding,” she explains.

During her two years in STEP, Luta became interested in medical devices. She added courses in biomedical engineering to her schedule and received training as an emergency medical technician. For her internship, she joined the technology transfer office at Cleveland Clinic, where she advised emerging startups that were commercializing products developed by Clinic physicians. After finishing her master’s degree, she founded Eleda International, a technology consulting firm.

In 2006, while conducting a workshop at NASA Glenn Research Center, Luta realized how much she missed being involved in the space program. So she gave up consulting and went to work for Barrios Technology, a NASA subcontractor. For five years, she trained astronauts at Johnson Space Center to execute spacewalks and served as a flight controller for the space shuttle and the international space station.

At NASA, Luta became known as an innovator. One of the agency’s continuing challenges has been to achieve a proper fit for each astronaut’s spacesuit. This is more difficult than it might seem. In the microgravity of outer space, the human body changes—the spine elongates, for example. And spacesuits are vehicles in their own right, consisting of multiple layers and sections and costing millions of dollars.

Luta offered to lead a multidivisional team to address the problem. Ultimately, the team included scientists and engineers, operational experts, medical personnel and astronauts. People from all these branches of NASA rarely come together for a single project, Luta says. It was an example of “intrapreneurship”—taking a novel approach within an existing organization.

When she thinks back to her time in STEP, Luta recalls a sense of discovery akin to what she’d experienced as a young scientist. “When you first learn about physics or biology, you think, ‘Wow, that’s how this works,’ and it’s so empowering,” she explains. “After being in STEP, we came out saying, ‘Now we have another piece of how the world works.’ That is what’s been great, and that is what’s been life-changing. It was a priceless education.”