Dr. Seth Shostak

Seth Shostak, Ph.D. is Senior Astronomer at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California. He has an undergraduate degree in physics from Princeton University, and a doctorate in astronomy from the California Institute of Technology. For much of his career, Seth conducted radio astronomy research on galaxies and has published approximately fifty papers in professional journals. During more than a decade, he worked at the Kapteyn Astronomical Institute, in Groningen, The Netherlands, using the Westerbork Radio Synthesis Telescope.
 
He has written several hundred popular magazine and web articles on various topics in astronomy, technology, film and television. He lectures on astronomy and other subjects at the California Academy of Sciences, and gives approximately 70 talks annually at both educational and corporate institutions. For the last five years, Seth has been a Distinguished Speaker for the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics.
 
Frequently interviewed for radio and TV, Seth has recently been seen and/or heard on Discovery Channel, Learning Channel, History Channel, the BBC, Ted Koppel's "Nightline", "The O'Reilly Factor", "Good Morning America", "Larry King Live", "Coast to Coast AM", NPR, CNN News, and National Geographic Television. He is the host of a one-hour weekly radio program on astrobiology Are We Alone?
 
He has edited and contributed to a half dozen books. His first popular tome, Sharing the Universe: Perspectives on Extraterrestrial Life appeared in March, 1998. In 1999, it was chosen as a Book of the Month Club science selection. He has also coauthored an astrobiology textbook, Life in the Universe, and his latest book is Cosmic Company. In 2004, he won the Klumpke-Roberts Prize for the popularization of astronomy.
 
Seth was the peer expert reader in the fields of SETI, cosmology, and astronomy for the 2005 Ray Kurzweil book The Singularity Is Near : When Humans Transcend Biology.