Join us for National Science on Screen Day, March 24th. A conversation will follow the film with Gabrielle Erwin, an astrobotany researcher at Winston-Salem State University, and Dr. Nick Oberlies, Ph.D., Distinguished Professor of Chemistry at University of North Carolina at Greensboro who is studying the creation of building materials from fungi in space.

STUDENTS GET IN FREE: Students at UNC-Greensboro and Winston-Salem State University may reserve a ticket and enter the promo code MARTIANSTUDENT for free admission to this program! Be prepared to show student ID at check-in.

During a manned mission to Mars, Astronaut Mark Watney is presumed dead after a fierce storm and left behind by his crew. But Watney has survived and finds himself stranded and alone on the hostile planet. With only meager supplies, he must draw upon his ingenuity, wit and spirit to subsist and find a way to signal to Earth that he is alive.

Gabrielle N. Erwin is a Biological Sciences major and researcher at Winston-Salem State University. Working at the intersection of astrobotany and regenerative medicine, she researches the effects of space-related stressors on astronaut health. As part of Dr. Rafael Loureiro’s research team, she studies stress-resilient crop plants and the development of regolith-based agriculture for off-world cultivation. Her research has even traveled to space aboard Blue Origin NS-31.

For more information, visit- https://www.gabrielleerwin.com/

Nick Oberlies is the Patricia A. Sullivan Distinguished Professor of Chemistry at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. His research group studies the chemistry of Nature in pursuit of anticancer and antibiotic drug leads, often funding by the National Institutes of Health. In particular, they study the chemistry of fungi. Recently, this has included a project funded by NASA where his team is studying the use of fungi for the creation of building materials in space. 

For more information, visit – https://chem.uncg.edu/oberlies/

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