Esther Putman is a Ph.D. student at the University of Colorado Boulder, advised by Dr. Allison Anderson. Her research will focus on neurophysiological measures of trust, workload, and situational awareness in order to improve human-autonomy teaming.  

Esther graduated with a B.S. in Biology and a B.S. in Neuroscience from the University of Kentucky in 2019. During her undergraduate experience, she conducted research on inflammatory astrocyte activation in Alzheimer’s disease and traumatic brain injury. She spent her undergraduate experience interning part time as a biological systems engineer for Space Tango, a commercial partner of research and manufacturing hardware for the International Space Station. In this role, she helped develop payloads investigating life and physical sciences in microgravity environments and helped student teams send their experiments to space. In the summer of 2017, she participated in the Space Life Sciences Training Program at NASA Ames Research Center where she studied cellular mechanisms related to astronaut bone density loss. Esther was part of the 2018 Brooke Owens Fellowship and received 2018 Astronaut Scholarship and Women in Aerospace awards. She received an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship in 2020 and completed her M.S. in Aerospace Engineering and M.E. in Engineering management from the University of Colorado Boulder in 2021. In her free time, you can find Esther taking ballet classes, playing piano, or hiking with her dog Apollo.