THE pioneering work of Dr Susan Ip Jewell is straight out of science fiction – but this week she’s saluted with an international award for making science fiction reality. And not for the first time.

Last year, the Hereford Times reported on Susan, who grew up in Hereford and now lives in Los Angeles, preparing for a simulation that would ready a team for a one-way mission to Mars and the start of future human colonisation. A mission she may well be on.

This week’s award is for her “day job” as a specialist space physician-scientist and biological engineer.

In that role she is the recipient of the 2015 Marie Marvingt Award from the Aerospace Medical Association for pioneering work in integrating technologies towards extreme environment survival skills necessary for deep space missions such as that planned for Mars.

Her projects include the 3D printing of medical tools, developing telesurgery and teleanesthesia training for space crews, and the extension of triage skills to planetary surface missions.

She has also focused on yoga/meditation as psychological countermeasures for crews living in isolation in extreme environments while testing head scanners and biosensors for increasing computer interface during mission simulations.

Susan may yet get the chance to test her technologies on herself on a mission to Mars.

She has already played senior roles in mission simulations and is the founder/President of MarsWithoutBorders, a non-profit organization for building and training analogue astronaut crews towards humans-to-Mars settlement and future colonies on the Martian surface.

Next year, Susan plans another simulation with MarsWithoutBorders. She is also among of pool of highly qualified candidates for crew places on a future NASA funded Mars mission simulation.

However far she may travel, Susan says a part of her will always call Hereford home.

She grew up in Tupsley with sisters Anne, Mary and Helen, who turned heads in the 70s singing as the Ip Sisters – an act that brought them national attention.

The Ip Sisters Chinese restaurant, then in Union Street, Hereford, was run by their dad and SAS legend Ip Kwong-Lau.

By the early 1990s, with the sisters gone their separate ways, Susan was living in Los Angeles.

Having honed her head for science with a bachelor’s degree in biology from Aston University, her studies since have put her at the forefront of 21st century space exploration.