[1] Lillian Virginia Haldeman -- whose name was sometimes misspelled as Holdeman -- was born in Moberly, Missouri, in 1929, and nicknamed "Peg".
She worked at the Center for Disease Control (CDC) for 15 years where she learned bacteriology and took night classes at the University of Georgia.
Supported by a NASA grant, she investigated the exchange of bacterial microbiomes among people isolated in space capsules.
In the initial weeks of a Skylab simulation in the early 1970s, Haldeman observed that astronauts had an increase from 2% to 25% in the intestinal populations of hydrogen-gas-producing Bacteroides thetaiotaomicron (over 26 trillion bacteria) which later proved to be due to a work-conflict stress in the simulation.
This increase in B. theta paralleled similar spikes observed in the intestinal population of a diet study volunteer undergoing extreme stress.
[1] Haldeman was awarded the title of University Distinguished Professor at Virginia Tech for contributions to anaerobic bacteriology research in 1976.