David Charbonneau has been called a “celestial detective” for his systematic search for planets orbiting nearby sun-like stars. Uncovering the secrets of these exoplanets, as they’re called, could conceivably lead to the first direct evidence of life beyond Earth.

Dr. Mario Livio is an astrophysicist, a best-selling author, and a popular speaker. He is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He has published more than 400 scientific papers on topics ranging from Dark Energy and cosmology to black holes and extrasolar planets.

Debra Fischer is a planet hunter who has discovered hundreds of worlds orbiting other stars, most of them gas giants, like Jupiter or Saturn. She is currently working to detect lower mass, Earth-like planets.

Brother Guy Consolmagno, SJ, earned undergraduate and masters’ degrees from MIT, and a Ph. D. in Planetary Science from the University of Arizona. He was a researcher at Harvard and MIT, served in the US Peace Corps (Kenya), and taught university physics at Lafayette College, Pennsylvania, before entering the Jesuits in 1989.

Margaret Turnbull leads the science team of the NASA New Worlds Observer mission looking for Earth-like planets and signs of alien life. She is an astrobiologist at the Global Science Institute in Wisconsin.

MIT physicist Enectali Figueroa-Feliciano works at the intersection of cosmology, particle physics, astronomy, and engineering.

David Spergel studies the big questions in cosmology and astrophysics: How large is the universe, and what is its shape? Is it finite? What are the dark matter and dark …

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.

Sara Seager is a planetary scientist and astrophysicist. She has been a pioneer in the vast and unknown world of exoplanets, planets that orbit stars other than the sun.

Kelle Cruz is an Assistant Professor in the Physics and Astronomy Department at Hunter College and a Research Associate at the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH), Department of Astrophysics.

Peter 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.

Emily Rice is an assistant professor at the College of Staten Island, City University of New York and a research associate in the astrophysics department of the American Museum of Natural History. She earned her Ph.D. at UCLA studying enigmatic objects called brown dwarfs, which form like stars but then cool and fade to resemble gas giant planets.

Dimitar Sasselov studies stars and planets at Harvard University, where he is the Phillips Professor of Astronomy. His research explores modes of interaction between light and matter. Sasselov and his team discovered several planets orbiting other stars with novel techniques that he hopes to use to find other planets like Earth.

Dr. Emily Rauscher received her B.A. from the University of California at Berkeley in Physics and Astrophysics. Rauscher then came to New York City for grad school, obtaining a Ph.D. in Astronomy from Columbia University.

Statia Luszcz Cook is a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Astrophysics at the American Museum of Natural History. Her research focuses on observing and modeling planetary atmospheres. She is an enthusiastic observer, having spent more than 50 days and nights at CARMA, a millimeter array in Eastern California; and several nights at the Palomar and W.M. Keck Observatories in California and Hawaii, respectively.

Dava Sobel has been writing about science for forty years, including a series of articles for The New York Times describing her month-long stint as a human subject in a laboratory study of circadian rhythm. Sobel is the author of several bestselling books about the history of astronomy.

Olivia Koski is head of operations for Guerilla Science, an organization that brings scientific discussion to unusual places. She began her career as an engineer researching high power laser systems for Lockheed Martin before moving to New York City to pursue a science journalism master’s at New York University.

Jana Grcevich is co-author of The Vacation Guide to the Solar System, a travel guide to the planets. She holds a PhD in Astronomy from Columbia University, worked as a postdoctoral fellow at the American Museum of Natural History, and is a data scientist living in New York.

David Kipping is a Professor of Astronomy at Columbia University where he leads the Cool Worlds Lab – a research team primarily focussed on discovering new planets and moons. Kipping’s …

Padi Boyd is the project scientist for the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) Mission (a NASA Explorer Mission launched in 2018), and chief of the Exoplanets and Stellar Astrophysics Laboratory in the Astrophysics Science Division, at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.

Loren Grush is a senior science reporter for The Verge, the technology and culture brand from Vox Media, where she specializes in all things space—from distant stars and planets to human spaceflight and the commercial space race.

Michele Bannister is a Royal Society Te Apārangi Rutherford Discovery Fellow and Senior Lecturer at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand. She is a planetary astronomer who researches planets …

Benjamin Pope is a Lecturer in Astrophysics & ARC DECRA Fellow at the University of Queensland. He is interested in the direct imaging of exoplanets and is co-investigator on three …