NASA awarded Professor David F. Dinges the Distinguished Public Service Medal "for outstanding contributions to improving the health, safety, and performance of human space flight in the behavioral health and performance area." The presentation was made May 10 at NASA Headquarters in Washington, D.C.
A NASA website describes the medal "as the highest honor NASA awards to a non-government individual, and that it is granted only to someone whose distinguished accomplishments contributed substantially to the NASA mission, and that the contribution must be so extraordinary that other forms of recognition would be inadequate."
Dinges is professor and director of the Unit for Experimental Psychiatry, and chief of the Division of Sleep and Chronobiology in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine. He currently serves as team leader for the Neurobehavioral and Psychosocial Factors Team of the National Space Biomedical Research Institute (NSBRI).
An expert in the biological limits of human performance relative to sleep and circadian biology, his scientific work for NSBRI and NASA has focused on identifying technologies that improve performance in operational settings and on identifying and preventing neurobehavioral problems in space. He is currently directing an experiment supported by NSBRI involving aquanauts and astronauts participating in the NASA Extreme Environment Mission Operations (NEEMO) 12 project in an underwater research laboratory off the Florida coast.
Internationally renowned, Dinges is a corresponding member of the International Academy of Astronautics and a member of the National Institutes of Health Council. He currently serves as president of the World Federation of Sleep Research and Sleep Medicine Societies, and he was the 2004 recipient of the first Decade of Behavior Research Award from the American Psychological Association. He is currently editor in chief of SLEEP, the leading scientific journal on sleep research and sleep medicine.