Jim Funaro is an anthropology instructor at Cabrillo College in Aptos, Calif., and founder of the Contact Conference, an interdisciplinary conference on the future focused on contact with aliens. One of his main areas of interest is the cultural impacts of contact with alien life.

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.

Douglas Vakoch is president of Messaging Extraterrestrial Intelligence, a San Francisco nonprofit research and educational organization dedicated to transmitting intentional signals to nearby stars. He has said that while there may be some problems for religion when intelligent aliens are discovered, they may not be as large as some people think.

Michael A.G. Michaud is a writer who specializes in technology and science. He is the author of Contact with Alien Civilizations: Our Hopes and Fears About Encountering Extraterrestrials and has written many articles on the possibility and potential impact of contacting intelligent extraterrestrials.

Seth Shostak is the senior astronomer at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, Calif. He is often the public face of SETI — and therefore the public face of the scientific search for intelligent life beyond our solar system. He is the author of Confessions of an Alien Hunter: A Scientist’s Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence.