Book Jill Tarter

Jill Tarter is an American astronomer who devoted her career to the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, and she remains its best-known public champion. She led the Center for SETI Research and was the SETI Institute's Bernard M. Oliver Chair. Her path began in graduate school, when her skill programming an aging PDP-8/S computer drew her into Stuart Bowyer's radio search at Hat Creek Radio Observatory; she coined the acronym for that project, SERENDIP. She served as project scientist for NASA's High Resolution Microwave Survey in 1992 and 1993, then directed its successor, Project Phoenix, at the SETI Institute, and in 2002 co-created the HabCat star catalog with Margaret Turnbull. After 35 years of searching, she stepped back from that research role in 2012. Discover magazine placed her on its 2002 list of 50 key women in science, and her honors include a NASA Public Service Medal (1993), the Women in Space Science Award (2003), the TED Prize (2009) and the Carl Sagan Prize for Science Popularization. She lectures widely on the question of whether we are alone and on the value of strong science education.