JSES Xi'an 2017
at Northwestern Polytechnic University
Xi'an, China
April 2017
Directed by Luca Pistor
Mentored by Dr. Hanns-Christian Gunga
Lead Mandarin-speaking students from the U.S.A., Scotty and Jacob Tamkin

Welcome to JSES Xi'an 2017!

JSES Xi'an 2017 Gallery

Who We Are

JSES Xi'an 2017 celebrated the collaboration between our 3 international locations of Santa Monica/LA, Berlin, and Xi'an. It has been a long time in the making. We first discussed the possibility of bringing JSES to China in 2015. We wanted to make sure the program would translate to new environment, and that our concepts were worked out. After developing 11 weeklong JSES programs, and dozens of workshops and in-school visits and assemblies, JSES Xi'an 2017 was launched in April! We will work with the feedback of 28 students and continue to evolve JSES International!

Our Mentor
​Our JSES Xi'an mentor, Prof. Hanns-Christian Gunga, is the head of the work group space medicine and extreme environments  since 2003. He studied geology, palaeontology and human medicine at the Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität in Münster and Berlin. Finishing medical school, he wrote his doctoral thesis about the famous German physiologist Nathan Zuntz (1847-1920).
In 1997 he wrote his habilitation thesis about the regulation of erythropotein in humans in extreme environments.
As a student of Prof. Karl Kirsch at the Free University Berlin, Department of Physiology, he he first encountered the topic of  human adaption to extreme environments. Karl Kirsch initiated this research field in the late 70’s, as a student of Prof. Otto Gauer.
Prof. Gunga’s main interests are evolutionary physiology, thermo-physiology, gravitational physiology, cardio-vascular physiology, high altitude and polar medicine as well as the history of sciences.
From 2004-2009 Prof. Gunga was the holder of the Nathan Zuntz Professorship.

Dr. Hanns-Christian Gunga is a long-time JSES space science mentor of JSES Berlin 2014-17 (in-classroom) where he has invited JSES in-house at the Center for Space Medicine and Extreme Environments at the Charité Hospital in Berlin. Dr. Gunga has been a long-distance speaker at JSES Los Angeles/Santa Monica 2014-17, and he recently hosted JSES Xi'an 2017 in Xi'an at NPU.

Our History

In early 2015 at JSES Berlin, Dr. Hanns-Christian Gunga, our space science mentor, suggested we start developing JSES Xi'an. We worked with our Mandarin-language students in Los Angeles (Scotty and Jacob) to develop JSES Xi'an over the last two summers. The available university dates didn't coincide with their school's springbreak so they joined us remotely, and suddenly the three locations of Berlin, Xi'an, and Los Angeles came together!

Thank you to Dr. Gunga, and all the students and associate professors in his NPU classroom, for welcoming JSES Xi'an 2017 and for creating a dynamic atmosphere of innovation and creative learning.