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Natasha Batalha
Natasha Batalha is a University of California President’s Postdoctoral Fellow at UC Santa Cruz. She studies planetary atmospheres at the nexus of observation and theory, with planets within the Solar System and beyond. She also works toward providing open-source, accessible, community tools and theoretical models to enhance science yield from JWST and other next-generation telescopes.
Ruslan Belikov
Ruslan Belikov is an astrophysicist at the NASA Ames Research Center, where he leads the Exoplanets Technologies research group. His interests lie primarily in directly imaging potentially habitable planets and characterizing their atmospheres for biomarkers. Over the past few years, his team pioneered techniques and mission concepts to directly image habitable planets around binaries, especially Alpha Centauri.
Anamaria Berea
Anamaria Berea is a visiting research assistant professor with the Complex Adaptive Systems Lab at the University of Central Florida and a research scientist with Blue Marble Space Institute of Science. She is researching communication from cells to societies, in living and non-living (AI) systems, and is also the instructor for a MOOC course on agent-based modeling at the Santa Fe Institute. She has been an AI mentor for the astrobiology team at NASA/SETI Frontier Development Lab in 2018.
Edwin (Ted) Bergin
Ted Bergin is Professor and Chair of Astronomy at the University of Michigan. His research focus is to follow the elements of life during each stage of star and planet formation. Using chemical theory, the solar system record, and high spatial resolution molecular observations with radio telescopes, the ultimate goal is understanding the formation of habitable and uninhabitable planets,
Alan Boss
Alan Boss is an astrophysicist at the Carnegie Institution who models the formation of stellar and planetary systems and heads the astrometric exoplanet search at Carnegie’s Las Campanas Observatory. His third book on the history of exoplanet searches, Universal Life: An Inside Look Behind The Race to Discover Life Beyond Earth, was published in January by Oxford U. Press.
Penelope Boston
Penelope Boston is an astrobiologist, geomicrobiologist, and the Director of the NASA Astrobiology Institute at NASA Ames Research Center. Her personal research has ranged from subsurface extremophiles (caves & mines) to supporting humans off-Earth, the geological processes that form caves on other planets, and other bits and pieces that take her fancy. The intersection of science with art, humanities, and social sciences is of particular interest.
Rick Carlson
Rick Carlson is a staff scientist at Carnegie’s Department of Terrestrial Magnetism. He has explored the role of mantle keels beneath the Earth’s continents in the formation and long-term survival of the overlying crust. Most recently, he has been studying how the terrestrial planets were assembled, and how their initial differentiation may have determined their current state.
John Chambers
John Chambers is a Staff Scientist at the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington D.C. His research interests include theoretical models for planet formation, the dynamical evolution of planetary systems, the origin and characteristics of habitable planets, and the development of N-body integrators.
Rebecca Charbonneau
Rebecca Charbonneau is a PhD candidate in History and Philosophy of Science and a Gates Cambridge scholar at the University of Cambridge. She specializes in the history of aerospace and astronomy in the 20th century, focusing particularly on radio astronomy and the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. She has held internships at NASA’s History Office and the National Radio Astronomy Observatory archives.
Jessie Christiansen
Jessie Christiansen is a research scientist at the NASA Exoplanet Science Institute, and Deputy Science Lead for the NASA Exoplanet Archive. She works on detection and characterization of transiting extrasolar planets, and in particular on the demographics of the exoplanet population with the NASA Kepler, K2 and TESS missions.
Adam Cohen
Adam Cohen is the President and CEO of Associated Universities, Inc (AUI). He previously served as the Deputy Under Secretary for Science and Energy at the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), overseeing basic science, applied energy research, technology development, and deployment efforts, including the stewardship of 13 of the 17 DOE National Laboratories, and was Deputy Director for Operations at the Princeton Plasma Physics Lab.
Cassie Conley
Catharine (Cassie) Conley is an astrobiologist with NASA Ames Research Center, studying life detection and adaptation of animals to extreme environments. After her first spaceflight experiment demonstrated that nematode worms can survive a meteorite-like atmospheric entry event (the crash of the Space Shuttle Columbia), Conley spent 12 years serving as Planetary Protection Officer at NASA Headquarters, responsible for controlling human-mediated transfer of organisms between planets.
Martin Cordiner
Martin Cordiner is a Research Associate at the Department of Physics, Catholic University of America, and an astrochemist and astrobiologist at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. His research aims to understand the chemistry and physics of solar system bodies, interstellar clouds and circumstellar environments, using a combination of ground and space-based observations and detailed computer simulations.
George Crovetto
George Crovetto is an optician by profession with interests in astrophysics and astrobiology. He has been a serious amateur astronomer from a young age, fabricating and repairing optical telescopes. Originally from Chile, he would travel to observe in the Atacama during the summers in the-mid 60s before any major observatories were built there.
Kathryn Denning
Kathryn Denning is Associate Professor of Anthropology at York University in Canada. After an early career focused primarily on ethics and narratives in archaeology, for the last fifteen years her work has revolved around the contributions of four-field anthropology to the science of astrobiology (including SETI), and the societal dimensions of searches for extraterrestrial life and space exploration.
Daniela de Paulis
Daniela de Paulis is a media artist, radio operator and radio telescope operator. She has been artist in residence at the Dwingeloo radio telescope since October 2009. She collaborates with a number of international organizations, including Astronomers Without Borders, for which she is the founder and director of the Arts program. She is member of the permanent SETI committee of the International Academy of Astronautics and has published her work with the Leonardo MIT Journal, Inderscience, Cambridge University Press and RIXC.
Steven J. Dick
Steven J. Dick was the 2014 Baruch S. Blumberg NASA/Library of Congress Chair in Astrobiology at the Library of Congress’s John W. Kluge Center. He has served as the NASA Chief Historian and Director of the NASA History Office. He is the author or editor of 24 books, including most recently Astrobiology, Discovery, and Societal Impact (Cambridge, 2018) and Classifying the Cosmos: How We Can Make Sense of the Celestial Landscape (Springer, 2019).
Frank Drake
Frank Drake is a Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He conducted, in 1960, the first modern search for radio signals from other civilizations, and has been active in SETI ever since. He presently works on optical SETI and with the Breakthrough Listen project.
Nadia Drake
Nadia Drake is science journalist and contributing writer at National Geographic. She has written numerous articles on astronomy and is the author of “Little Book of Wonders: Celebrating the Gifts of the Natural World” (National Geographic, 2016). Nadia has a PhD in epigenetics from Cornell University, and her work has recently appeared in The New York Times, Scientific American, and The Atlantic.
David Grinspoon
David Grinspoon is an astrobiologist and Senior Scientist at the Planetary Science Institute who has served on the science teams of several active spacecraft missions. In 2013 he was appointed as the inaugural Chair of Astrobiology at the U.S. Library of Congress. His books include “Earth in Human Hands” (2016) and “Chasing New Horizons: Inside the Epic First Mission to Pluto” (2018, with Alan Stern).
Harshal Gupta
Harshal Gupta is an astronomer and program officer at the National Science Foundation where his responsibilities include the Green Bank Observatory, the Astronomy and Astrophysics Postdoctoral Fellowships program, and the Laboratory Astrophysics portfolio within the Astronomy and Astrophysics Research Grants program. His research interests include laboratory rotational spectroscopy and radio astronomical observations of highly reactive molecules important in the interstellar gas, the growth of molecular complexity in space, and the Diffuse Interstellar Bands.
Jihae
Jihae is a singer, songwriter, and actress who has performed at the London Olympics, the Cannes Film Festival, and the United Nations General Assembly. She has appeared in Peter Jackson’s film, “Mortal Engines,” and is currently playing two identical twins: one the commander of the first human colony on Mars and the other the Secretary General of the Space Agency on Earth, in the National Geographic miniseries, “Mars.” She continues to donate her time and performances to organizations involved in human rights.
Chris Impey
Chris Impey is a University Distinguished Professor of Astronomy and Associate Dean of the College of Science at the University of Arizona, a past Vice President of the American Astronomical Society and an NSF Distinguished Teaching Scholar. His research interests are observational cosmology, galaxies, and quasars. He has taught two online classes with over 180,000 enrolled. He’s the author of two textbooks and numerous popular articles and books on cosmology and astrobiology, most recently “Einstein’s Monsters: The Life and Times of Black Holes”.
Jim Kasting
Jim Kasting is Evan Pugh Professor of Geosciences at Penn State University, and has created, and helped to create, climate models to define the width of the liquid water habitable zone. His work on the faint young Sun problem on Earth and Mars, and on the question of the rise of atmospheric Oxygen is relevant to exoplanet biosignatures, the search for Earth-like planets, and extraterrestrial life.
Ken Kellermann
Ken Kellermann is a Senior Scientist Emeritus, at NRAO where for the past half century he has studied radio galaxies and quasars, and their application to cosmology. He published the first peer reviewed SETI experiment 53 years ago, but discouraged with the lack of success, has since confined his SETI activities to participation in workshops and conferences.
Jeff Kuhn
Jeff Kuhn is a professor of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Hawaii’s Institute for Astronomy whose research is broadly directed toward astrophysical problems related to optical and Infrared remote sensing. He was a founder and, for ten years, director of the UH’s Advanced Technology Research Center on Maui. Some of his work in optics and instrumentation is a core part of the PLANETS Foundation and MorphOptic, Inc, where he was a founding partner.
Sun Kwok
Sun Kwok is an astrochemist at the University of British Columbia. His recent interests have been in the identification of complex organics in stars and in the interstellar medium. He served as the President of Astrobiology Commission of the International Astronomical Union from 2015 to 2018. His book “Physics and Chemistry of the Interstellar Medium” (USB, 2007) is widely used as a textbook on astrophysics and astrochemistry in the world.
Glen Langston
Glen Langston is a radio astronomer and program officer at the National Science Foundation where he is lead for Milky Way, Galactic Astronomy Grants. His research interests include interstellar chemistry and radio emission from dust. He is active in education and outreach, particularly in aiding high schools in building their own radio telescopes.
Joseph Lazio
Joseph Lazio is the Chief Scientist of the Interplanetary Network Directorate at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology. He has served as the Deputy Director of the Lunar University Network for Astrophysics Research (LUNAR), part of the NASA Lunar Science Institute; and is currently the Project Scientist for the Sun Radio Interferometer Space Experiment (SunRISE). As Chief Scientist of the Interplanetary Network Directorate, his responsibilities include increasing the science return from NASA’s Deep Space Network.
Charley Lineweaver
Charley Lineweaver is an astrophysicist and astrobiologist at the Australian National University. His research interests include exoplanet statistics, habitability and the entropy of the universe. With Paul Davies and Michael Ruse, he edited “Complexity and the Arrow of Time” (2013). He is currently creating a MOOC: “Are We Alone?…well…How did WE get here?”
Felix J. Lockman
Felix James “Jay” Lockman is a radio astronomer at the Green Bank Observatory, and the Green Bank Telescope Principal Scientist. His research is focused on the structure and evolution of the Milky Way galaxy. He is co-editor of the book “But it was Fun, the first 40 years of Radio Astronomy at Green Bank” and developed the course “Radio Astronomy” for “The Great Courses”.
Jenn Macalady
Jenn Macalady is a professor and microbiologist in the Department of Geosciences at the Pennsylvania State University. Her group uses molecular biology to reveal how the environment structures microbial life in space and time, with an eye toward understanding how life could be structured on other planets including the early Earth. She has been Director of the Center for Environmental Geochemistry and Genomics, Faculty-in-charge of the Graduate Program in Biogeochemistry, and Exec Comm Member of the Penn State Astrobiology Research Center. She can often be found underground in caves.
Meredith MacGregor
Meredith MacGregor is an NSF Astronomy and Astrophysics Postdoctoral Fellow at the Carnegie Institution for Science, Department of Terrestrial Magnetism (DTM) who will become an assistant professor at the University of Colorado Boulder in the Department of Astrophysical and Planetary Sciences (APS) next year. Her research program uses multi-wavelength observations to explore the formation and potential habitability of planetary systems, and the impact that stellar activity has on surrounding planets and disks.
Rocco L. Mancinelli
Rocco L. Mancinelli is a Senior Research Scientist with the Bay Area Environmental Research Institute where he studies microbe-environment interactions with emphasis on the environmental limits in which organisms can live. He has investigated life in evaporitic salt crusts, the alkaline and acid hot springs of Yellowstone National Park, and space environment in Earth orbit. He has been either the PI or Co-I on eight Space flight microbiology experiments flown inside and outside spacecraft.
Stefanie Milam
Stefanie Milam is a scientist in the Astrochemistry Laboratory at the NASA Goddard SpaceFlight Center working on missions including JWST and WFIRST. She uses both radio telescopes and space-based observatories in her research into astrochemistry and molecular astrophysics of diverse environments, covering the interstellar medium, evolved stars, star forming regions, and comets.
Michael P. Oman-Reagan
Michael P. Oman-Reagan is an anthropologist, doctoral candidate, and Vanier Scholar at Memorial University in Canada, and is affiliated with the University of Victoria, British Columbia.
He studies space exploration, SETI, astrobiology, and futures. He is a founding board member of the Just Space Alliance and co-organizer of the 2018 Making Contact workshop. His research has been published in Scientific American, Critical Quarterly, International Journal of Astrobiology, Cultural Anthropology, and Futures.
Karen O’Neil
Karen O’Neil is a radio astronomer and Director of the Green Bank Observatory. She was previously on the scientific staff of the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico where she worked for five years. She has been at Green Bank now for over 16 years, first as a staff scientist, then as Program Manager and finally as the Director, a position she has held for 12 years.
Ted Peters
Ted Peters serves as co-editor of the journal, “Theology and Science,” at the Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences, and teaches at the Graduate Theological Union, Berkeley, California. He authored “The Evolution of Terrestrial and Extraterrestrial Life” (Pandora 2008) and co-edited “Astrotheology: Science and Theology Meet Extraterrestrial Life” (Cascade 2018).
Carl Pilcher
Carl Pilcher was trained in chemistry and astronomy. He has held a variety of positions at NASA Headquarters, including Kepler Mission Program Scientist and Senior Scientist for Astrobiology with responsibility for overall management of NASA’’s Astrobiology Program. In 2006 he became Director of the NASA Astrobiology Institute at the NASA Ames Research Center and held that position—with an 18-month retirement break–until 2016. His interests cover the full scope of astrobiology.
Scott Ransom
Scott Ransom is an astronomer with the National Radio Astronomy Observatory and a research professor at the University of Virginia who specializes in pulsars and neutron stars. He is interested in signal processing algorithms to find weak astrophysical radio signals. He is a co-author of the textbook “Essential Radio Astronomy” and was a visiting professor with the Breakthrough Listen project.
Martine Rothblatt
Martine Rothblatt is CEO of United Therapeutics, a biotechnology company she started to save the life of one of her daughters, and at which Barry Blumberg served as Scientific Advisory Board Chair for the last decade of his life. Previously, she created and led Sirius XM. She began her career representing the National Academy of Sciences’ Committee on Radio Frequencies in its efforts to protect spectrum most valued by radio astronomers from encroachment by wireless communications systems. Her assessment of the Drake equation is accessible on YouTube. Her most recent books are Virtually Human: The Promise and Peril of Digital Immortality, and Your Life or Mine: The Conflict Between Public and Private Interests in Xenotransplantation.
Lynn Rothschild
Lynn J. Rothschild is an evolutionary biologist, astrobiologist and synthetic biologist at NASA’s Ames Research Center, and Adjunct Professor of Molecular and Cellular Biology & Biochemistry at Brown University. She is passionate about the origin and evolution of life on Earth or elsewhere, while at the same time pioneering the use of synthetic biology to enable space exploration. Her research has focused on how life, particularly microbes, has evolved in the context of the physical environment, both here and potentially elsewhere. More recently Rothschild has brought her imagination and creativity to the burgeoning field of synthetic biology, articulating a vision for the future of synthetic biology as an enabling technology for NASA’s missions, including human space exploration and astrobiology.
James S.J. Schwartz
James S.J. Schwartz teaches philosophy at Wichita State University and is the founding coordinator of the Wichita Space Initiative. His research focuses on the philosophy, ethics, and policy of space exploration – with particular interests in planetary protection and its rationale, space mining policy, and ethical questions surrounding space settlement. He is author of the forthcoming book “The Value of Science in Space Exploration” (Oxford University Press, 2020).
Andrew Siemion
Andrew Siemion is Director of the Berkeley SETI Research Center, Principal Investigator for the Breakthrough Listen Initiative and holder of the Bernard M. Oliver Chair for SETI at the SETI Institute. He and his team oversee a global research program seeking to determine the prevalence of technologically capable life in the Universe.
Hanna Sizemore
Hanna Sizemore is a Senior Scientist at Planetary Science Institute and an adjunct scientist at the Green Bank Observatory. Her research focuses on the history and mobility of water ice in silicate regoliths of the inner solar system, combining numerical simulations and laboratory experiments with spacecraft data analysis. She was a science team member on the Mars Phoenix Lander mission, and a Guest Investigator on the Dawn Mission to dwarf planet Ceres.
Kelly Smith
Kelly Smith is an associate professor of philosophy and biological sciences at Clemson University. He is the founding president of the Society for Social and Conceptual Issues in Astrobiology (SSoCIA), a highly interdisciplinary group dedicated to research on the many broader questions raised by astrobiology and space exploration generally. His research interests include the concept of genetic disease, the relationship between religious faith and scientific reasoning, the ethical implications of biotechnology, and all things astrobiology.
David Tatel
David Tatel is a federal judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit with a lifelong interest in science — especially astronomy. He Co-Chairs the National Academy of Science Committee on Science, Technology, and Law; serves on the AUI board; and is the son of Dr. Howard E. Tatel, who designed Green Bank’s first telescope, the 85-foot antenna named in his honor.
Alycia Weinberger
Alycia Weinberger, from the Carnegie Institution for Science’s Department of Terrestrial Magnetism, is an observational astronomer interested in planet formation and exoplanets. She uses high spatial resolution imaging and spectroscopy to study disks, which contain the raw materials for planets, around young stars to try to connect their structures and compositions to the processes of planet formation. She is also involved in building instrumentation for high contrast and high spectral resolution studies of disks.
Barry Welsh
Barry Welsh has been a project manager for many NASA ultraviolet astronomy missions (EUVE, SOHO, FUSE, GALEX and HST-COS) while at the Space Sciences Laboratory of UC Berkeley. His research on interstellar gas produced the first 3-D model of the local interstellar medium within 300 pc of the Sun. He now works on the detection of exocomets.
Dan Werthimer
Dan Werthimer is the Marilyn and Watson Alberts SETI Chair at UC Berkeley, chief scientist of the Berkeley SETI Research Center, and principal investigator of SETI@home and the Center for Astronomy Signal Processing and Electronics Research (CASPER). Dan was in the Homebrew Computer Club with Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak; everyone in that club became ultra-rich, except Dan, because he wanted to search for ET.
Angie Wolfgang
Angie Wolfgang is an Assistant Research Professor at Pennsylvania State University. Their field of expertise is statistical modeling of planetary populations, with a focus on bulk planetary compositions. The goal of their research is to describe the physics of planet formation in a probabilistic sense and to quantify the diversity of extrasolar planet properties.
Jason Wright
Jason Wright, a professor at Pennsylvania State University, is a stellar astrophysicist specializing in the detection and characterization of exoplanets. He also works in SETI, having served as the first Breakthrough Listen Visiting Professor at UC Berkeley, and chaired the NASA Technosignatures Workshop and edited its report. He leads the nascent Penn State Extraterrestrial Intelligence Center.