Meet Savi Glowe: Building a Nonprofit for the Next 500 Years!

Savi Glowe, Co-Founder and CEO of BioAstra

BioAstra is not your average nonprofit. Its scientists study what happens to the human body in space, travel to some of the most extreme places on Earth, and explore how discoveries made in those environments could improve healthcare for the rest of us.

And its Co-Founder and CEO, Savi Glowe, is building the organization with a rather unusual timeline in mind.

Five hundred years.

When Savi said that during our recent conversation, I stopped her to make sure I had heard correctly.

“500 years?”

She wasn’t joking.

Most nonprofit leaders I work with are understandably thinking about this year’s budget and their next three-to-five-year strategic plan. Savi is thinking about what BioAstra can discover today while building an institution that could still be advancing human health centuries from now.

After spending time with her, somehow that doesn’t seem quite as crazy as it sounds.

Why Study Medicine in Space?

Before meeting Savi, “space biomedicine” wasn’t exactly a phrase I used very often. My first question was probably the obvious one: If you want to improve healthcare, why study it in space?

Because space makes healthcare incredibly difficult.

There is no hospital around the corner, no specialist to call and no pharmacy to run to. Medical equipment has to be compact, durable and efficient. Supplies are limited. Meanwhile, microgravity, radiation and isolation place stresses on the human body that scientists are still trying to understand.

Solving those problems is essential if humans are going to spend more time in space. But this is where the work gets really interesting: many of the solutions could matter just as much on Earth.

A medical system designed to function hundreds of thousands of miles from a hospital could have applications in a rural community or disaster zone. Portable equipment created because every ounce matters on a spacecraft could be useful where sophisticated medical infrastructure doesn’t exist. Learning how the body responds to radiation in space could deepen our understanding of radiation and human health at home.

BioAstra calls it moving innovation from “orbit to operating room.”

That’s what hooked me. Space is the laboratory. Better human health is the bigger opportunity.

Why Savi?

Once I learned more about Savi, I understood why she was drawn to something this ambitious.

She spent more than a decade working in healthcare and digital health at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. During COVID-19, she helped drive the Mount Sinai COVID Informatics Center, bringing together data science, digital health and clinical care while the medical community was confronting questions it had never faced before.

She later became Chief Research Operations Officer at ProofPilot, where her work included clinical study design and the integration of artificial intelligence into research.

There is a pattern here. Savi has built a career at the intersection of healthcare, science, data and technology, often working on problems where the answer isn’t obvious.

BioAstra takes that curiosity to an entirely different level.

Its work includes genetic and molecular research connected to NASA and commercial astronaut missions. But some of its most intriguing research happens without leaving Earth.

In 2026, BioAstra researchers traveled to Bikini Atoll, where 23 nuclear weapons tests were conducted between 1946 and 1958. Decades later, life survives there.

The team collected microbial samples to study how organisms have adapted to long-term radiation exposure. Why can life survive in an environment exposed to that much radiation?

What changed? What can those adaptations teach us about biological resilience?

Those answers could someday help scientists understand how to better protect humans during long-duration spaceflight. And what we learn about radiation, adaptation and the body's response to extreme stress could have implications far closer to home.

That is BioAstra in a nutshell: go where the conditions are extreme, ask questions we haven’t been able to answer, and see where the discoveries lead.

Funding the Unknown

There are a few problems with funding science.

For starters, research opportunities don’t always match up with funding calendars.

A private astronaut mission can suddenly provide access to biological samples researchers have never had before. An expedition can create an opportunity to gather data from an environment that can’t be reproduced in a laboratory. If the money isn’t available when the opportunity appears, the opportunity may disappear with it.

That brought Savi and me to a part of the conversation much closer to my world: philanthropy.

We talked about major gifts, donor-advised funds, appreciated stock and an area she is particularly interested in exploring—venture philanthropy. Which makes perfect sense for this kind of work.

Venture investors understand that innovation comes with uncertainty. Not every experiment works, and not every idea becomes the next big breakthrough. Funding scientific discovery requires some of that same willingness to take a chance on an idea before you know exactly where it will lead.

In fundraising, we are often trained to tell donors exactly what their gift will accomplish. Build this. Feed this many people. Fund this program.

Research is different.

Sometimes you are funding the chance to discover something nobody knows yet.

For the right philanthropist, that isn’t a drawback. It may be the most exciting part of the opportunity.

Thinking 500 Years Ahead

BioAstra isn’t only investing in research. It is investing in the people who will conduct it. Its fellowship program gives emerging scientists opportunities to work in areas ranging from genomics and radiation biomarkers to drug repurposing, cognitive performance and AI-enabled tools with potential humanitarian applications.

Some of those scientists may eventually make discoveries Savi and BioAstra’s other founders cannot imagine.

If you really want to build something that lasts for generations, that is exactly what you want.

You can’t build a 500-year organization around one person or one generation. You have to develop people who will challenge what we know, ask questions we haven’t considered and take the work places the founders never imagined.

Maybe even space.

I spend much of my professional life helping nonprofits answer a deceptively simple question: What are you really asking people to invest in?

For BioAstra, the easy answer is space research.

After meeting Savi, I think that answer is much too small.

BioAstra is asking what the most extreme environments can teach us about keeping people healthy. Could technology developed for astronauts eventually help someone who lives hours from the nearest hospital? Could studying radiation in space, or organisms surviving decades after nuclear testing, lead to discoveries that change what we know about the human body?

Nobody knows.

That’s why you do the research.

Great science starts with questions we can’t yet answer and people curious enough to pursue them. It also requires people willing to fund the search.

Savi Glowe is trying to build an organization that can do both for a very long time.

Maybe even 500 years.

To learn more about BioAstra, its research, or ways to support its work, visit bioastra.org.

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I help nonprofits raise more money through education, coaching, and strategic planning. I also lead high-impact professional development, coaching programs, and retreats for companies of all sizes. If you're ready to strengthen your fundraising strategy, turn board members into advocates, or build a comprehensive legacy giving program, let's talk.