Gioia Massa is a NASA scientist at Kennedy Space Center in Florida who works on food production for the International Space Station (ISS) and future exploration endeavours. She also heads an interdisciplinary group to study fertiliser and light impacts on the nutrition and flavour of space-grown crops. Gioia also helps with science needs for other space station hardware and works with external investigators to get their science to function on the station. Gioia’s goal is to give residents of a future Mars habitat a better quality of life through green, growing plants. Her passion is to enable NASA’s grand challenge of space colonisation as humanity transitions from a planet-bound to a spacefaring civilisation.