SETI Institute - An introduction to the research & education programs of SETI

Celebrating its 35th year in 2019, the SETI Institute, founded by Astronomers Carl Sagan, Jill Tarter and Frank Drake, has grown from a small research team focused on searching for radio signals beyond our solar system (as a proxy for intelligent civilizations) to an organization of over 90 PhD scientists representing 23 different academic backgrounds, organized into 6 divisions of research. CEO, Bill Diamond, will describe the multidisciplinary structure and research of the Institute, whose mission is to explore, understand and explain the nature and origins of life in the universe. As research partner to NASA on such missions as Cassini, Kepler, New Horizons and OSIRIS REx, the breadth of the Institute’s activities includes instrumentation, technology development, data analytics and science support. Field expeditions supporting astrobiology and planetary geology include work in the Arctic, Antarctic, Atacama, Andes, Iceland, and Western Australia. Mr. Diamond will outline these programs, as well as the Institute’s education initiatives supporting STEAM, and its artificial intelligence summer research accelerator for NASA, called the Frontier Development Lab, which includes a partnership with Oxford University.