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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

John Traphagan is a professor of religious studies at the University of Texas at Austin, where he teaches a course on extraterrestrials and previously taught one on the impact the discovery of intelligent alien life might have on religion. He is the author of Extraterrestrial Intelligence and Human Imagination: SETI and the Intersection of Science, Religion, and […]

Steven Dick is an astrobiologist and editor of The Impact of Discovering Life Beyond Earth  and Many Worlds: The New Universe, Extraterrestrial Life and Theological Implications. In 2013, he gave a joint lecture on the same subject at the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s Dialogue on Science, Ethics and Religion.

Stephen Freeland is an evolutionary biologist and director of interdisciplinary studies at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. He studies the interface of science and religion and gave a joint lecture in exoplanets for the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s Dialogue on Science, Ethics and Religion.