Jill Tarter

Concerned citizen, Educator/Teacher, Explorer, Idea generator, Parent, Project manager, Scientist

Jill Tarter is an Earthling who holds the Bernard M. Oliver Chair for SETI Research at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California. Tarter received her Bachelor of Engineering Physics Degree with Distinction from Cornell University and her Masters Degree and a Ph.D. in Astronomy from the University of California, Berkeley. She served as Project Scientist for NASA's SETI program, the High Resolution Microwave Survey, and has conducted numerous observational programs at radio observatories worldwide. She is a Fellow of the AAAS and the California Academy of Sciences, she was named one of the Time 100 in 2004, and one of the Time 25 in Space in 2012, received a TED prize in 2009, two public service awards from NASA, multiple awards for communicating science to the public, and has been honored as a woman in technology. Since the termination of funding for NASA's SETI program in 1993, she has served in a leadership role to design and build the Allen Telescope Array and to secure private funding to continue the exploratory science of SETI. Many people are now familiar with her work as portrayed by Jodie Foster in the movie Contact.

Our Long Future Exoplanets Extremophiles Life Beyond Earth

Earth 2.0 - it's in the sky - it's in your future - soon! An army of citizen scientists could answer one of humanity's oldest questions - Are we alone? - with SETI Live!

Astronomy, Citizen Science, samba, SETI

In 2009, I finally got to give a TED talk as part of my TED Prize.

dancing flying sewing my husband's paisley shirts