Participants
Natalie Batalha is a UC Presidential Chair, Professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics, and Director of Astrobiology at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She will lead the Early Release Science program for transiting exoplanets — a scientific community effort to acquire some of the first observations of exoplanets with the James Webb Space Telescope.
Read MorePeter Staley has been a long-term AIDS and gay rights activist, first as a member of ACT UP New York, then as the founding director of TAG, the Treatment Action Group. He served on the board of the American Foundation for AIDS Research (amfAR) for 13 years.
Read MoreSteve Vance is a scientist in the Planetary Chemistry and Astrobiology group at Caltech’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena. Dr. Vance is an Acting Staff Scientist for the Europa Clipper, a NASA mission pre-formulation study for a robotic mission, which is being conducted by JPL in partnership with Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Maryland.
Read MoreCaleb Scharf’s research career spans cosmology, exoplanetary science, and astrobiology. He currently leads efforts at Columbia University in New York to understand the nature of exoplanets and living environments in the universe.
Read MoreSteve B. Howell is currently the Head of Space Science and Astrobiology for the NASA Ames Research Center. He previously was the project scientist for
NASA’s premier exoplanet finding missions: Kepler and K2. Howell has written over 800 scientific publications, numerous popular and technical articles, and has authored and edited eight books on astronomy and astronomical instrumentation.
Allyson Sheffield is an observational astronomer whose research focuses on the formation and structure of the Milky Way galaxy. She studies the motion and chemistry of old stars, from which we can infer the evolutionary history of the Milky Way.
Read MoreSusan Schneider is the 2019 Distinguished Scholar at the Library of Congress and the Director of the AI, Mind and Society (AIMS) Group at the University of Connecticut. She writes about the fundamental nature of the self and mind.
Read MoreSara Walker is an astrobiologist and theoretical physicist, researching the origin of life and how to discover life on other worlds. She is developing new theory to understand life, based on the fundamental role information plays in living matter. Her goal is to develop quantitative criteria for the origin of life and for identifying life on other worlds.
Read MoreKathryn Denning is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at York University in Toronto. Her research includes projects on the social impacts of astrobiology and SETI, the evolution of intelligence, and contemporary ideas concerning the colonization of space.
Read MoreWilliam B. Hurlbut is a physician and adjunct professor in the Department of Neurobiology at Stanford University Medical Center. His primary areas of interest involve the ethical issues associated with advancing biomedical technology, the biological basis of moral awareness, and studies in the integration of theology and philosophy of biology.
Read More