Barbara Rice’s life and career began on a small Simpson County farm but has taken her around, and even above, the world. She has moved through hospitals, schools and international service programs, each stop adding a skill that turned a farm kid from Kentucky into an important figure at NASA’s Johnson Space Center who measured what weightlessness does to the human body. 

Rice grew up the youngest of nine children. While livestock projects fell to her brothers; she preferred 4-H demonstrations on sewing, cooking and public speaking. Those contests often led to the University of Kentucky campus, where she saw laboratories, met faculty and ultimately decided it was a place she belonged.  

“We’d go for 4-H competitions or leadership events, and it just made an impression,” Rice said. “It felt like a place where things were happening, where people were doing real work that mattered. UK felt like the obvious place to go if I wanted to learn something practical and meaningful.” 

Feeding minds 

After her first year majoring in what was then home economics, Rice visited an older sister in Atlanta and found summer work as a student dietitian at Grady Memorial Hospital. Grady was one of the nation’s busiest public hospitals, a place where Saturday nights meant trauma cases on a regular basis. Rice followed registered dietitians who wrote meal plans for patients with burns, gunshot wounds and chronic illness.  

“That’s when I knew—I don’t want to just do home economics,” Rice said. “I want to work in dietetics. I want to understand how nutrition affects real people in real situations. When I got back to UK in the fall, I told my adviser, ‘I need a new plan.’ And that’s how I found the direction I’d stay on for the rest of my career.” 

A bachelor’s degree in the Department of Dietetics and Human Nutrition at the Martin-Gatton College of Agriculture, Food of Environment was not enough; registered dietitian status required an approved internship. She was accepted to the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Los Angeles. The internship ran a full year, rotating through clinical wards, food-service management and research labs. When it ended, she accepted a clinical job in a private hospital, keeping it the recommended twelve months before moving to a new role directing the meal programs for the Culver City School District. 

It was at California State University, Los Angeles, where Rice then pursued a master’s degree that sharpened her research skills and brought teaching assignments. Between academic terms, Rice joined the International Farm Youth Exchange, spending almost a year in Panama. She called it one of the most meaningful things she has ever done. 

“I moved from one host family to another—fourteen in total,” Rice said. “Honestly, that was a gift. I got to see how people lived in different parts of the country and got to help with agriculture projects. I slept in hammocks, ate what they ate and did whatever jobs they were doing. It taught me that nutrition isn’t one-size-fits-all—it has to be practical, and it has to meet people where they are.”  

After obtaining her master’s degree, Rice opened a small private practice and consulted at Children’s Hospital, counseling parents on nutrition for children with developmental special needs along with training students from 13 different disciplines to perform nutritional screening evaluations.  

“I realized I didn’t want to go back to a hospital full-time,” Rice said. “So, I started seeing clients on my own and ended up with a full-time practice. I’d work with people who had diabetes or high blood pressure, sometimes athletes or young moms just trying to figure out how to feed their kids better. It was professionally quite rewarding because it made a difference in real lives.” 

Reaching for the stars 

In 1989, a corporate transfer moved Rice, her now-husband and daughter to Houston. Rice kept her private practice alive for a few months, flying back to Los Angeles one week each cycle, but soon answered a Johnson Space Center notice for a research dietitian.  

NASA hired her that autumn.  

Crew members launched aboard shuttle flights one to two weeks long, but even those brief stays in microgravity produced bone loss, fluid shifts and metabolic changes. The nutrition research studies Rice carried out involved projects such as collecting dietary intake data on each astronaut subject during each phase of spaceflight.  

“When I got hired, our job was to figure out how microgravity affects the human body, and nutrition was a big piece of that,” Rice said. “In the research studies we weighed every single food item the astronauts ate before they launched. We analyzed it chemically. We measured their blood and urine specimens before, during and after their missions. Then we fed them the exact same meals after they landed and did it all again. Over time, we learned a lot—about calcium loss, about fluid shifts, about how to help the body recover.”  

Data pointed to the need for vitamin D supplements, resistive exercise and balanced sodium levels—findings that later shaped long-duration missions. 

When NASA began joint work with Russia’s Mir station, Rice helped build a joint U.S.-Russian nutrient database containing both U.S. and Russian flight foods. Her methods carried over to the International Space Station, where crews now spend half a year or more in orbit. Improved menus and exercise devices have since cut bone-loss and muscle-loss rates, milestones essential for any long-term stays in space. 

Saving lives below Earth 

Rice’s NASA expertise also reached inside the Earth.  

In 2010 a mine collapse trapped 33 men deep beneath the Chilean desert. The Chilean embassy asked NASA for “astronaut flight food,” but Rice and her team knew the miners, who had lived on sips of water and a few cans of fish, needed a staged return to normal eating. They selected a balanced liquid formula readily absorbed by starved organs, outlined a gradual progression to soft local dishes and located supplies to recommend. The plan helped bring the men to the surface in stable condition, and Chilean physicians later cited it as a key factor in their recovery. 

“They’d been underground for two weeks without real food,” Rice said. “Their bodies were in a starvation state. You can’t just hand someone a full meal after that; it could shut their organs down.”  

What the miners needed, Rice said, was a medical nutrition formula, something balanced and easy to absorb. She participated in devising a refeeding plan that eased them back into normal eating, with Chilean foods with which they were familiar.  

“I never met any of those miners, but I watched them come up on TV, and I thought, ‘They look okay. They’re going to be okay.’ That was a good feeling.” 

Life after NASA 

After 27 years, Rice retired from Johnson Space Center in 2016.  

She still lectures on space nutrition, noting that exercise protocols developed for orbit now guide osteoporosis therapy and that compact food-packaging advances have migrated to wilderness rations. Asked whether humans will reach Mars, she answers without hesitation: The diet plan is ready, the exercise hardware works and the medical data hold few surprises. What remains are propulsion, shielding and political will—problems for other specialists. 

She often returns to Kentucky to visit siblings and speak at 4-H events. Teenagers want to know how someone from a small farm ended up designing research menus for orbiting laboratories. Extraordinary work, she says, grows from ordinary decisions made consistently. That mindset carried her from county fairgrounds to a career in nutrition, be it in low-Earth orbit or hospital trauma units. 

“I never set out to work at NASA or help feed miners halfway across the world,” Rice said. “I just said yes to the next thing that made sense. That’s really how it happened—one opportunity, one conversation, one decision at a time. I think people forget that you don’t have to have it all figured out at the start. Just stay curious and keep moving forward, seize every opportunity, learn from each job and be willing to leave home when the map points elsewhere.” 

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Writer: Jordan Strickler, jstrickler@uky.edu                

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