Shu Boboila

Shu is currently a second-year law student at Duke.  Prior to law school, she obtained her Ph.D. degree in biomedical sciences at Columbia University.  Shu is going to practice patent law, where she can utilize her background in science and law to translate scientific discoveries from the lab into products that benefit the society.

Shu has always thought that space exploration is incredibly cool.  She is excited about the possibility of human settlement on Mars in the future.  More recently, through her law school courses and her work on the Going to Mars project, she became aware of the many potential risks associated with Mars exploration.  Her paper analyzes one such risk, backward contamination, the possibility that invasive extraterrestrial life forms carried inadvertently on returning outer space missions might negatively alter our planet.  Such extraterrestrial entities could cause catastrophic events, including pandemic disease and significant climate change. Shu proposes a multiagency framework to address the current regulatory gap in the mitigation of backward contamination risks.