Tara Melaine Ruttley (born 1975/1976) is Associate Chief Scientist for Microgravity Research at NASA Headquarters in Washington, DC. Prior to this, she was Associate Program Scientist for the International Space Station (ISS) at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas. Until 2007, she was lead hardware engineer for the ISS Health Maintenance System, leading a team of engineers whose job was to provide reliable medical equipment that kept astronauts healthy in orbit. She subsequently served as the lead hardware engineer for the ISS Human Research Facility. She served as an aquanaut on the NASA Extreme Environment Mission Operations 6 (NEEMO 6) crew in July 2004. Education Ruttley was born in Houma, Louisiana, and raised in Lafayette, Louisiana. Since Ruttley had always loved biology and physiology, she started her educational journey focusing on a career in life sciences. She received a Bachelor of Science degree in biology and a Master of Science in mechanical engineering with an emphasis in biomedical engineering from Colorado State University (CSU), where she was a member of the Class of 2000. She also received a Ph.D in neuroscience in 2007 from University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston. Ruttley was a McNair Scholar at CSU. At CSU, Ruttley became involved with the Colorado Space Grant Consortium and the student branch of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA). As an undergraduate, and through her participation in student design conferences, she became more interested in the hardware aspects of maintaining optimal crew health in space. Ruttley soon realized the importance of an interdisciplinary approach to designing hardware for crew health, so she pursued her master's degree in Mechanical Engineering. Ruttley also belonged to the American Society of Mechanical Engineers and Sigma Xi while attending CSU. Ruttley's master's thesis was the testing of a novel gravity-independent resistive exercise device, the Constant Force Resistive Exercise Unit (CFREU), which she had developed in collaboration with CSU's AIAA student design team. The team had tested one version of the machine in microgravity aboard NASA's KC-135 aircraft. They subsequently received a $70,000 contract from NASA to develop an improved prototype. Ruttley and her husband, Paul Colosky, patented the CFREU design when they graduated from CSU. In 2018, Ruttley completed an MA in Anthropology/Archaeology at the University of Houston, where her research focused on spiritual practices of the pre-Civil war enslaved populations at the Jordan Plantation in Brazoria County, Tx. NASA career