Nathalie Cabrol is a senior research scientist and director of the Carl Sagan Center at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, Calif. She is an astrobiologist and planetary scientist. She contributed an essay on SETI for the book Aliens: The World’s Leading Leading Scientists on the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence.

Lewis Dartnell is an astrobiologist and a science communicator at the University of Westminster in London. He gives frequent lectures on the search for intelligent alien life, what it might look like and want and how it might change us. He is the author of Life in the Universe: A Beginner’s Guide.

Sir Martin Rees is a cosmologist, Astronomer Royal of the British Empire, a member of the House of Lords and the winner of the Templeton Prize in 2011. He contributed an essay on man’s place in the universe to Aliens: The World’s Leading Scientists on the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. In 2010 he said in […]

Jim Al-Khalili is a professor of physics at the University of Surrey in Guildford, England, and a frequent presenter of television programs about science for the BBC and Britain’s Channel 4. He is the editor of Aliens: The World’s Leading Scientists on the Search for Extraterrestrial Life.

Sarah Scoles is a science journalist and former associate editor of Astronomy magazine. She is the author of Making Contact: Jill Tarter and the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. She is based in Denver.

The Rev. Michael Heller is a Catholic priest, philosopher and cosmologist at the Pontifical University of John Paul II in Krakow, Poland. He has written numerous books and articles — mostly in Polish — about the nature of the universe, its origins and something he calls a “theology of science.” He received the 2008 Templeton […]

The Rev. Giuseppe Tanzella-Nitti is an Opus Dei priest and a professor of fundamental theology at the Pontifical University of the Holy Cross in Rome. He previously was an astronomer and researcher at the Observatory of Turin in Turin, Italy. He is editor of The Interdisciplinary Encyclopedia of Religion and Science, where he tackled the […]

The Rev. David Wilkinson is a professor of theology and religion at Durham University in Durham, England. He is also an ordained Methodist minister with a doctorate in the study of star formation and the evolution of galaxies. He is the author of Science, Religion and the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence.

Dirk Schulze-Makuch is a professor at the Center for Astronomy and Astrophysics at the Technical University in Berlin and the author or co-author of five books on the possibility of extraterrestrial life, including The Cosmic Zoo: Complex Life on Many Worlds.