Janice Meck

Janice Valerie Meck (born 1948, also published as Jan Meck, Janice M. Sprenkle, Janice M. Fritsch, Janice M. Yelle, and Janice M. Fritsch-Yelle) is an American physiologist and an expert on the effects of zero gravity on the cardiovascular system, including cardiac rhythm problems during spaceflight, and spaceflight-induced orthostatic intolerance and its treatment.

Education and career

Meck is originally from Virginia, where she was born in 1948. After a 1969 bachelor's degree from Michigan State University, and 11 years out of school raising a child, Meck received a master's degree in biology from Virginia Commonwealth University in 1982, and became a researcher there in cardiovascular physiology. There, her work included joint research with NASA, and she moved to NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas in 1991.

She directed the NASA Cardiovascular Laboratory from 1992 to 2007, while working towards a Ph.D. in pharmacology from the University of Texas Medical Branch, which she received in 2000 with the dissertation Influence of gender on individual susceptibility to orthostatic hypotension. After stepping down as director of the laboratory she became a human health countermeasures element scientist at the Johnson Space Center.

Meck retired from NASA, and moved to Richmond, Virginia in 2011. There, she has worked at the Hunter Holmes McGuire Veterans Affairs Medical Center and as a docent at the Virginia Museum of History and Culture. She coauthored a book about Emily Winfree, a former slave and freedwoman in Richmond: The Life and Legacy of Enslaved Virginian Emily Winfree (Arcadia Publishing, 2021, with Virginia Refo).

Recognition

Meck received the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers in 2000, and the Rotary National Award for Space Achievement in 2001. Virginia Commonwealth University gave her their Distinguished Alumni Award in 1998, and named her as an "alumni star" in 2001. She was named as an honorary member of Graduate Women in Science in 2008.