Membership

Jason Wright is a Professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics at Penn State who studies nearby stars and their planets, and SETI. He serves as director of the PSETI Center and leads a group of graduate students in various research projects, such as searches for Dyson Spheres and collaborations with other SETI groups, such as Breakthrough Listen. He also develops curriculum for the field, having developed courses at the graduate and undergraduate level in SETI.

In 2019 he was awarded the Drake Award by the SETI Institute for his work in exoplanets and SETI.

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Derek Fox is an Associate Professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics at Penn State. He is engaged in multiple research efforts targeting gamma ray burst afterglow discovery and observation, optical transient discovery and characterization, and searches for the first multi-messenger (optical/X-ray plus neutrino or gravitational-wave) transients. 

Jennifer Macalady, an Associate Professor of Geosciences at Penn State who studies the origins and diversity of life, has served on three separate NASA Astrobiology Institute teams. A geomicrobiologist, she explores and sequences the genomes of present-day analogs of ancient microbial life in an astrobiological context.

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Michele L. Mekel is the associate director of the intercollege Bioethics Program at Penn State. She is also a teaching professor of bioethics, an affiliate faculty member of Penn State Law and the Rock Ethics Institute, and she has a joint appointment in the Department of Humanities at Penn State College of Medicine.

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Steinn Sigurdsson is a Professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics at Penn State who works on a variety of theory problems across astrophysics. He is also the Science Director of arXiv, a Science Editor of The Astrophysical Journal, and trustee for the Aspen Center for Physics.

Olivia Curtis is a postdoctoral scholar in the Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics at Penn State. She works on extragalactic SETI, searching for signs of technosignature waste heat emanating from extragalactic sources. She also works on modeling the orbits and stabilities of possible Dyson swarms.

Pinchen Fan is a graduate student in the Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics at Penn State. She is developing a laser pipeline to look for laser emissions in the spectra taken with the Habitable-Zone Planet Finder on the Hobby-Eberly Tlescope. She also works on the characterization of Earth’s technosignatures and their detectability. She also manages most of the PSETI website.

Personal Website

Winter Parts (they/it/xe/ey) is a graduate student in the Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics at Penn State. Previously, it worked on methods to mitigate the effects of stellar magnetic activity on exoplanet radial velocity measurements. Currently, they are researching Solar System technosignatures to set upper limits on the potential existence of extraterrestrial artifacts in the Solar System.

Nick Tusay is a graduate student in the Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics at Penn State. He analyzes radio data from the Green Bank Telescope using the Breakthrough Listen TurboSETI pipeline.

Aidan Groenendaal is an undergraduate student at Penn State.

Lennon Nichol is an undergraduate student at Penn State.

Ana Cristina Scigliani is an international student from Panamá majoring in Astronomy and Astrophysics with a minor in Mathematics. She likes sustainable spacecraft design, aliens, and high-energy astrophysics.

John Gertz is the President and CEO of Zorro Productions, Inc. He has produced four Zorro motion pictures, including The Mask of Zorro (1998) and its sequel, The Legend of Zorro, with Antonio Banderas and Catherine Zeta-Jones. During his tenure, 12 different TV versions of Zorro have been produced, as well as more than 75 ZORRO stage productions. In 2005, together with world-renowned author Isabel Allende, he released the best-selling novel about the genesis of Zorro. He teamed up with Quentin Tarantino to create the graphic novel, Django/Zorro, currently being developed into a motion picture by SONY. Gertz is the worldwide lead producer of Zorro: The Musical, with a score by the Gipsy Kings, which premiered on London’s West End in 2008 and has since been produced throughout the world. In the field of SETI, Gertz served three terms as chairman of the board of the SETI institute, is the only lay member of the Breakthrough Advisory Board, assisted in the founding of PSETI, and he has published a number of theoretic papers (available on ArXiv). He is also an amateur astronomer, classical pianist, beekeeper, mycologist, and an organic vegetable gardener. He has served on innumerable non-profit boards, and as president of five.

Macy Huston graduated from the Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics at Penn State. They use Modules for Experiments in Stellar Astrophysics (MESA) models to study the effects of Dyson spheres on stellar structure and evolution. They are now a Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, working on microlensing projects.

Daniel Mills is a planetary biologist and historical geobiologist working on the early evolution of Earth’s biosphere. He specifically links major transitions in the evolution of life — notably the origin of eukaryotes and the evolution of complex multicellularity — with the evolving geochemistry of Earth’s surface environment. He is broadly interested in applying knowledge of the Earth system to understand the likelihood and nature of extraterrestrial biospheres capable of communicating with the Earth.

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Sofia Sheikh recently earned her PhD in Astronomy and Astrophysics from Penn State. She is currently a Postdoctoral Researcher with the Berkeley SETI Research Center, working on the Breakthrough Listen Project.

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Evan Sneed is a postbaccalaureate researcher who earned their Bachelor of Science in Astronomy & Astrophysics from Penn State. They use astrodynamical models, such as REBOUND, to identify both when and where to search for radio technosignatures.