Kishan Tarpara, D.O.
I’ve been lucky in my life to be able to follow my intellectual curiosity and try to make a career of it. For the last 10 years or so I’ve been motivated by the goal of becoming a NASA flight surgeon, or being involved in some way with human space exploration. I did various internships/rotations at NASA and I got the following advice from various people in the field of space medicine: follow your clinical interests, mostly because there’s no guarantee that space medicine jobs will be available, so do something you enjoy first. Regardless of your clinical specialty there will be a role for you to contribute in this endeavor. So I did follow my interests, which led me to do clinical training in neurology at UT Southwestern. I'm currently doing a clinical fellowship in Autonomic Disorders, and will be starting a clinical fellowship in Sleep Disorders in 2021. I find both fields separately fascinating, and the areas of overlap interestingly underexplored. They’re both multisystemic specialties and I think training in both fields will uniquely prepare me to study certain earthly clinical questions and contribute to the space medicine field.
Outside of medicine, I like cooking, gardening, reading, running, hiking, dragonboating, and am currently learning piano.