A UC Riverside research team has won $250,000 as a runner-up in NASA’s Deep Space Food Challenge, an international competition challenging participants to develop systems to produce food on the International Space Station.

The team led by Robert Jinkerson, an associate professor of chemical and environmental engineering in UCR’s Marlan and Rosemary Bourns College of Engineering, was honored on Aug. 16 at a reception at the Nationwide & Ohio Farm Bureau 4-H Center in Columbus, Ohio.

One of about 200 teams that entered the competition, the UCR team, dubbed Nolux (shorthand for “no light”), designed a system that can grow mushrooms in 2 cubic meters of dark space — about the size of a small closet — and uses no more than 1,500 watts of electricity. The mushrooms are fed acetate as a source of carbon for growth.

The system can produce enough mushrooms for 4,000 calories of food energy per day.  

Jinkerson also is developing a tomato variety that can be grown in space in a collaboration with Martha Orozco, director of UCR’s Plant Transformation Research Center. This tomato is slated to be grown in the International Space Station orbiting above Earth. 

Read more about Jinkerson’s research in the latest issue of UCR Magazine.