Ellen Garcia is a recent graduate of Horticultural Sciences, earning her Ph.D. in August 2025 and immediately starting as a postdoctoral research associate with NASA at Kennedy Space Center in September 2025. Her research uses hyperspectral imaging and molecular data to better understand how plants respond to stress in space.
As part of the Advanced Plant Imaging Team, the goal is to help scientists and eventually automate the monitoring of plant health with less direct intervention from astronauts. It’s an important part when considering how plants will be grown in space during future exploration.
When speaking with Garcia to learn more about her role in space exploration and, eventually, life on Mars, she described the experiences at UF that led her to where she is today and shared advice for students hoping to follow in her footsteps.
Working at Kennedy Space Center
Growing plants in space requires researchers to think about how gravity, radiation, pressure, atmosphere, lighting, fertilizer, waste, and food safety function within an environment where resources and time to intervene are limited.
Much of Garcia’s day-to-day involves coding and programming. Currently, she is working to integrate hyperspectral imaging with transcriptomics and metabolomics, connecting imaging with molecular data to better understand how plants respond to stress.
This is done by rigorously testing plant stressors in controlled environments using “space-relevant” plants that are more resilient to drought, salt, high carbon dioxide levels, changes in light quality, or pathogens. Hyperspectral imaging allows the research team to detect subtle changes in plants beyond what the human eye can see and connect these observations with underlying molecular changes through integrated data analysis.
This approach was demonstrated in a Plant Phenomics publication led by first author Lalit M. Kandpal, with Garcia as second author, through a collaboration among the University of Florida, National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Kennedy Space Center, and the United States Department of Agriculture Agricultural Research Service. The advanced plant imaging team at Kennedy Space Center is led by Aubrie O’Rourke, with Tie Liu leading the University of Florida collaboration and Moon Kim and Insuck Baek leading hyperspectral imaging efforts at the Agricultural Research Service. The research was funded by NASA Biological and Physical Sciences (BPS).
The goal is to eventually develop an autonomous greenhouse in space and help researchers monitor the plants remotely.
“If there is a camera, for example, and if our algorithm was able to detect from the hyperspectral imaging that it’s droughted, you would be able to add water or change the light conditions from Earth,” Garcia continues, “an astronaut’s time is extremely valuable. They’re on a minute-to-minute schedule, and they have a lot of experiments to do, so we want to minimize the crew time and how much they have to do.”
Her position also gives her an opportunity to participate in larger conversations about what growing plants beyond Earth would eventually look like.
“I get to be part of meetings on planning to grow plants on the International Space Station, Moon and Mars, and understand the challenges associated with that” Garcia said.
Plants in these environments must be considered as part of a much larger system. Outside of providing food and oxygen, researchers must consider how plants affect air quality within a closed environment, how fertilizer and waste will be managed, and how food safety will be maintained.
“It’s really interesting to think at a systems level and creatively,” Garcia said. “It makes you feel like anything is possible. I love the creativity behind that. You really have to think outside the box.”
Garcia’s role at NASA extends into mentoring. Garcia is deeply involved in outreach that broadens public access and understanding of space biology. As part of her role, she is currently supervising an intern working directly on bioinformatics to better understand molecular responses in lettuce to spaceflight relevant- stressors.
She also participates in programs such as the Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden’s “Growing Beyond Earth” symposium aimed at middle and high school students, where young learners work on problems that “directly help” NASA teams and see how their efforts feed into future space missions as well as to “grow and learn about space plants and get excited about it” as they contribute to real datasets that inform which plant projects go to the International Space Station.
Being based at Kennedy Space Center, Garcia occasionally joins tours of areas such as the vehicle assembly building and attends debriefs with returning ISS crews and Q&As with Artemis astronauts, experiences that she finds “really exciting” and also a way to bring cutting-edge research directly to her students and interns.
Background in Plant Science
Born and raised in Miami, Garcia was first introduced to agriculture through its environment. In high school, she began watching documentaries, seeking out information on how food production affects the environment.
She knew the general direction she wanted to pursue but wasn’t yet sure what career that interest could lead to.
“I had tried a few jobs before that, like working in a law office, in a vet clinic, and then once I worked in the lab, I was like, ‘This is it, and I want to keep learning about genetics specifically,’” Garcia said.
She knew around her second year of undergrad that she eventually wanted to pursue a Ph.D. and chose to pursue UF’s Horticulture program because of its practical application in research and relationship to growers as a land-grant university.
“[Researchers] were doing a lot of work that was actually helping the farmers in Florida,” Garcia said. “It felt like if I was part of their part of the department, doing that type of work, I would be able to make a difference.”
Garcia was co-advised by Drs. Tie Liu and Ali Sarkhosh, Associate Professors of Horticultural Sciences, both working on passion fruit postharvest and expanding it as a year-round viable crop for Florida growers. Her publication in the Electronic Data Information Source of UF/IFAS Extension emphasized the competitive advantages in marketability for Florida growers. It could not only be of high economic value but also provide immense benefits for human health, containing high levels of vitamins A and C, riboflavin, niacin, iron, potassium, zinc, and magnesium. Her doctoral research examined the genes, proteins, and metabolites associated with postharvest shelf life in passion fruit.
Otherwise, usable fruit could become unmarketable simply because it deteriorated too quickly. Garcia saw improving shelf life as one way plant science could help address that waste. According to Dr. Liu, up to 40% of food loss occurs between harvest and consumption.
The crop also carries a personal connection for Garcia. Her family is from Cuba and Nicaragua, where passion fruit is popular. She remembers passion fruit from visiting Nicaragua as a child and hopes it expands as a specialty crop in Florida.
As Garcia began to investigate improvements for passion fruit varieties, relatively few genetic resources were available. She felt that studying the fruit and giving it attention would provide more resources for its research and lead to eventual change. She saw her work as an opportunity to “be part of the foundation for passion fruit”, and that the foundational information developed through her doctoral work could support further improvements to the crop.
According to Liu, Garcia’s approach to research stood out throughout her time at UF. “[Garcia] is an exceptionally motivated and independent scientist with outstanding experimental and analytical skills. She takes ownership of her research, [approaching] scientific questions thoughtfully. Her strong work ethic, scientific curiosity, and ability to independently drive projects from conception to completion make her an outstanding researcher,” Liu said.
Advice for Future Horticulturists
Some of the skills that eventually carried Garcia from passion fruit research to space biology came from looking beyond the courses she was required to take, taking several electives outside her field, and learning how to work with data herself in order to find genes she needed in the genome annotation of passion fruit.
“I had to code to do that, and I didn’t know how yet – and this was before AI became more popular,” she said.
She enrolled in a bioinformatics course where she learned Python, Linux, and SQL.
Garcia remembers spending nights working through code and discovering that an error could come down to something as small as a space or period, but the effort paid off.
“Coding – I use it every single day, and I don’t think I would be able to succeed in this position without having professors there to teach me and having spent all of the time on the homework and the quizzes,” Garcia said.
It’s central to what she does today for her work at the Kennedy Space Center, and for current students she advises expanding beyond learning any one technical skill.
“I would say to try a lot of different skills and participate in as many extracurricular activities as possible,” she said.
By her final year at UF, Garcia was involved in several student organizations. She credits interactions with peers in helping her learn about different areas of research and identify useful skills and courses.
She encourages students to seek out faculty members beyond their immediate advisers.
“Talk to as many mentors as possible, tell them your interests, and get feedback from them,” she said. “I did talk to a lot of professors that weren’t on my committee and weren’t my advisors, and they would give amazing advice.”
She also sees artificial intelligence and machine learning becoming increasingly valuable for scientists working with large amounts of biological information.
“I think we’ve accumulated a ton of biological data, but not everyone knows what to do with it or how to combine it,” Garcia said.
Garcia is now applying the skills she began developing at UF to questions that extend far beyond Florida agriculture.
“I love that I am part of this plant imaging team,” Garcia said, “and that maybe one day we’ll be using sensors from our pipeline to detect plant stress to be able to grow them in space.”
–
Photographs and captions provided by Dr. Ellen Garcia
4
