Current Research and Scholarly Interests
Kovacs is a long-standing member of the Defense Sciences Research Council (DARPA), and has served as Associate Chair and Chairman. He also has extensive industry experience including co-founding several companies, including Cepheid in Sunnyvale, CA.
His present research areas include biomedical instruments and sensors, miniaturized spaceflight hardware, and biotechnology. He is the Director of Medical Device Technologies for the Astrobionics Program at the NASA Ames Research Center, and Principal Investigator of the Stanford-NASA National Center for Space Biological Technologies. He helps direct a variety of projects spanning wearable physiologic monitors, biosensor instruments for detection of chemical and biological warfare agents and space biology applications, and free-flyer experiment payloads.
In 2003, he served as the Investigation Scientist for the debris team of the Columbia Accident Investigation Board, having worked for the first four months after the accident at the Kennedy Space Center, Florida. In this role, he carried out physical, photographic, x-ray, chemical and other analyses on selected items from the nearly 90,000 pounds of recovered debris and worked toward understanding the nature of the accident. He currently serves as Engineering/Medical Liason on the Spacecraft Crew Survival Integration Investigation Team (SCSIIT) of the Johnson Space Center.
He is a Fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering. Kovacs is a private pilot, scuba diver, and a Fellow National of the Explorers Club. He was a member of a NASA and National Geographic Society sponsored team that climbed Licancabur volcano (19,734 ft.) on the Chile/Bolivia border in November of 2003, serving as medical, physiologic research, and photography lead. In November of 2004, he served the same role on a return expedition to Licancabur, and carried out medical research and underwater videography in the summit lake.
