---
title: "Jean Sibonga"
type: "entity"
entity_kind: "person"
status: "hub"
canonical_name: "Jean Sibonga"
aliases: ["Sibonga","J. Sibonga","Jean D. Sibonga"]
first_seen: "2026-08-22T00:00:00.000Z"
writer_model: "claude-opus-4-8"
connects_to: ["spaceflight bone loss","countermeasures","trabecular-cortical","NASA Johnson Space Center","ARED"]
seek_code_commit: "17d9798"
---


Bone physiologist who leads the Bone and Mineral Laboratory at NASA's Johnson
Space Center, responsible for the agency's long-running program measuring
astronaut skeletal loss and the effectiveness of in-flight countermeasures. She
is the first author of the 2019 *Bone* study showing that in-flight resistive
exercise on the Advanced Resistive Exercise Device protected cortical bone at the
femoral neck but did not prevent hip trabecular loss
([[claim-sibonga-2019-ared-protects-cortical-not-trabecular-in-spaceflight]]).

Within this vault her 2019 study is Böcker et al. 2026's reference 23 and one of
the two spaceflight-side pillars establishing the trabecular/cortical
countermeasure asymmetry beneath the compartment dissociation
([[claim-bocker-refs-support-bedrest-cortical-spaceflight-trabecular-dissociation]]).
She recurs across the vault's spaceflight bone-loss cluster as a co-author of the
Spector/Smith/Sibonga primary studies the bed-rest-analog thread rests on
([[entity-jorn-rittweger]]'s hub notes the earlier bed-rest notes drawing on that
group).

## References
- [[claim-sibonga-2019-ared-protects-cortical-not-trabecular-in-spaceflight]] · [[claim-bocker-refs-support-bedrest-cortical-spaceflight-trabecular-dissociation]]
- Captures: 2026-08-16-does-the-compartment-level-literature-böckers-refs-12