Rabbi Geoffrey A. Mitelman is the founding director of Sinai and Synapses, an organization that brings together Judaism and science, mostly through the introduction of scientists into synagogue programming. He is also a scholar of biblical and Judaic studies. Mitelman can be contacted through the Sinai and Synapses website.

Peter Harrison is a former professor of science and religion at the University of Oxford in Oxford, England, and an expert on the dialogue and tensions between science and religion. He is the author of The Territories of Science and Religion. He is now director of the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at […]

Matthew Stanley is an astronomer and a professor of the history and philosophy of science at New York University. In 2016, he gave a talk at the annual meeting of the American Physical Society on the question of whether we are alone in the universe, and if we are not, what would that mean to our […]

Michael Waltemathe is the chair of practical theology at Ruhr-Universität Bochum in Bochum, Germany. Much of his research focuses on a “religious vision” of space travel and exploration.

Albert A. Harrison is a professor emeritus of anthropology at the University of California, Davis. He is the author of Starstruck: Cosmic Visions in Science, Religion and Folklore and After Contact: The Human Response to Extraterrestrial Life.

Kathryn Denning is an associate professor of anthropology at York University  in Toronto, Canada, where she teaches a course called “Anticipating the Alien.” Her focus is on what it means to be human in the universe and she works with SETI on studying the way scientists search for aliens.

Salman Hameed is an astronomer and associate professor of integrated science and humanities at Hampshire College. He is director of the Center for the Study of Science in Muslim Societies.  He operates the science and religion blog called Irtiqa, which emphasizes debates about science in the Islamic world.

Nidhal Guessoum is an astrophysicist at the American University of Sharjah in the United Arab Emirates and the author of Islam’s Quantum Question: Reconciling Muslim Tradition and Modern Science. As part of a panel discussion on the implications of finding other worlds at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science […]

Florence Raulin Cerceau is a director at Messaging Extraterrestrial Intelligence and an associate professor at the National Museum of Natural History in Paris. She is a historian of astrobiology and of the search for intelligent alien life.