Dr Joshua Chou

Dr Joshua Chou is Chief Science Officer of Stardust Inc. and Co-Founder and Chief Scientific Officer of XELGEN.

Dr Joshua Chou is a pioneer in space biology and medicine. He designed and built the world's first cell-biology microgravity simulator, a platform now used by NASA, JAXA and the Australian Space Agency, and by leading research institutions around the world, to study how human cells behave without gravity.

That work has helped show how cells sense mechanical forces. It revealed how six different types of cancer detect mechanical stimuli and how that sensing can be disrupted. It also showed how the blood-brain barrier can be opened to deliver treatment to the brain. Dr Chou has flown automated cell-culture systems to the International Space Station. He then took the science out of the lab: his company was the first to use microgravity to biomanufacture cell therapies, turning space biology into treatments for patients on Earth.

His research has been published in Cell, alongside more than 60 peer-reviewed papers. He is a Dean's Scholar at Harvard School of Dental Medicine and a JSPS Fellow, with research affiliations at the Harvard Medical School Bioinformatics Core and the University of Tokyo. His work has been recognised with the Charlie Teo Fellowship for advancing brain cancer research and an Australian Good Design Award for Best in Engineering. He serves on the Australian Space Agency's Space Medicine and Life Science Committee and co-founded the Australian Space Biology Symposium. Today he is Co-Founder and Chief Scientific Officer of XELGEN, which applies cellular intelligence to regenerative and longevity medicine.

The road here was not easy. There were rejections and doubts, and at the start only one researcher in all of Australia believed in this work. That researcher backed Dr Chou and worked alongside him. From that partnership, his collaborator has gone on to lead space biology research, with support from the United States Space Force and beyond.

Dr Chou was part of the founding group behind the idea for Japan's Martian Moons eXploration mission, MMX, which aims to bring back the first-ever samples from Phobos, a moon of Mars.