Lealem Mulugeta is the current Project/Lead Scientist of NASA's Digital Astronaut Project (DAP). The DAP is dedicated to implementing well-validated computational models to help predict and assess spaceflight health and performance risks, and to enhance the development of health risk countermeasure.

Since joining DAP, Lealem has played a strong role in the development and implementation of standardized methods for verification, validation and credibility assessment of NASA’s biomedical computational models. In doing so, he works very closely with highly multidisciplinary teams of researchers and engineers to develop and implement computational models for space biomedical research.