Alec Stevenson
11.30 - 11.55 - G Force and acceleration atelectasis
Dr Stevenson has over 16 years of experience in aviation medicine research, test and evaluation, and over this period has been involved in over fifty experimental protocols. His experience in experimentation has been supplemented by personal exposures to various environmental stresses particularly the high G environment where he has clocked over a 1,000 runs. Dr Stevenson has been the chief investigator for acceleration studies at QinetiQ for over a decade years and has conducted numerous trials during this period, ranging from the investigation of regional lung distension during positive pressure breathing under +Gz, to the effects of a rapid loss of anti-G trouser pressure on cerebral blood flow and oxygenation.
In 2012, he received the Aerospace Medical Students and Residents Organization (AMSRO) scholarship for his research and in 2017 was awarded a PhD by King’s College London, for his thesis entitled ‘cerebral blood flow and oxygenation under sustained accelerative stress’. His talk will focus on a recent series of studies that was part of the Aircrew System Research Programme funded by the Defence, Science and Technology Laboratory (Dstl). The work investigated the risk of a condition known as acceleration atelectasis developing when breathing enriched oxygen concentrations under sustained head-to-foot (+Gz) accelerations.
