Earth at the Crossroads II |

Jonathan B. Wiener is the William R. Perkins Professor of Law, and Professor of Environmental Policy and Public Policy, at Duke University, where he co-directs the Duke Center on Risk in the Science & Society Initiative He is a University Fellow of Resources for the Future (RFF), and a Past President of the Society for Risk Analysis (SRA). His publications include the books: Policy Shock: Recalibrating Risk and Regulation after … Crises (Cambridge Univ. Press, 2017, with Ed Balleisen, Lori Bennear, and Kim Krawiec); The Reality of Precaution: Comparing Risk Regulation in the United States and Europe (RFF/Routledge, 2011, with Michael Rogers, Jim Hammitt, and Peter Sand); Reconstructing Climate Policy (AEI Press 2003, with Richard Stewart); and Risk vs. Risk (Harvard Univ. Press 1995, with John Graham). He was a co-author of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), 5th Assessment Report (2014), Working Group III, chapter 13 on “International Cooperation: Agreements and Institutions.” Before coming to Duke, he served in the US Government, at the Department of Justice (DOJ), the White House Office of Science & Technology Policy (OSTP), and the White House Council of Economic Advisers (CEA). In these roles, he helped negotiate the Framework Convention on Climate Change (FCCC), attended the Rio Earth Summit (1992), helped draft Executive Order 12866 (1993), and helped launch the Americorps National Service program (1993). He was a law clerk for then-Judge Stephen G. Breyer on the US Court of Appeals in Boston, and for Judge Jack B. Weinstein on the US District Court in New York. He received degrees in economics and in law from Harvard University.

Photo by Jim Preston, Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum.

Dr. Ellen Stofan is the Under Secretary for Science and Research at the Smithsonian Institution. She oversees the science museums and science research centers as well as the Smithsonian Libraries and Archives, Office of International Relations, Smithsonian Scholarly Press and Scientific Diving Program. Her focus is on the Smithsonian’s Our Shared Future: Life on a Sustainable Planet initiative and collective research, especially in areas of biodiversity, climate change, global heath, sustainable communities, and environmental justice.

Stofan previously was the John and Adrienne Mars Director of the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum. As the former Chief Scientist of NASA, Stofan served as the principal advisor to the Administrator on science programs and strategic planning. Currently, she is on the science team of the NASA Dragonfly mission to Titan.

Stofan holds master’s and doctorate degrees in geological sciences from Brown University, and a bachelor’s degree from the College of William & Mary.

J.R. McNeill, Distinguished University Professor at Georgetown University, has authored or edited more than 20 books, including Something New Under the Sun, listed by the London Times among the 10 best science books ever written (despite being a history book); and Mosquito Empires, which won the Beveridge Prize from the American Historical Association; and most recently The Webs of Humankind (2 vols.). He is former president of both the American Society for Environmental History and the American Historical Association; a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Academia Europaea, and the Académie Royale du Maroc; and recipient of the Heineken Award for History from the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Brother Guy Consolmagno SJ is the Director of the Vatican Observatory. A native of Detroit, Michigan, he earned degrees in Planetary Science from MIT and the University of Arizona. He was a research fellow at Harvard and MIT, served in the US Peace Corps (Kenya), and taught university physics before entering the Jesuits in 1989. At the Vatican Observatory since 1993, in 2015 Pope Francis appointed Dr. Consolmagno director of the Vatican Observatory.

Abigail Fraeman is a planetary scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the Deputy Project Scientist for the Curiosity Mars rover. She researches the evolution of Mars and its moons, and is also involved in developing new instruments and mission concepts for future exploration. Abigail was previously the Deputy Project Scientist for the Opportunity Mars rover, a Co-I on the Compact Reconnaissance Imaging Spectrometer for Mars, and is currently a Participating Scientist in JAXA’s upcoming MMX mission to Phobos. She received a B.S. in Physics and Geology & Geophysics from Yale University, and a PhD in Earth and Planetary Science from Washington University in St. Louis. In her spare time, Abigail enjoys cooking, backpacking, and photography.

Dr. Ravi Kopparapu is a planetary scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center and a lead for the Sellers Exoplanet Environments Collaboration. He is renowned for his research on exoplanets, focusing particularly on the search for habitable environments and technological life on worlds orbiting other stars. Dr. Kopparapu frequently contributes to communicating the status of the search for life to a broader audience through his writings in media. In recognition of his contributions, he was awarded NASA’s Exceptional Scientific Achievement Medal in 2020.

Georgetown professor Sarah Stewart Johnson‘s research is driven by the underlying goal of understanding the presence and preservation of biosignatures within planetary environments. Her lab is also involved in the implementation of planetary exploration, analyzing data from current spacecraft as well as devising new techniques for future missions. A former Rhodes Scholar and White House Fellow, she received her Ph.D. from MIT and has worked on NASA’s Spirit, Opportunity, and Curiosity Rovers. She is also a visiting scientist with the Planetary Environments Lab at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. Her first book, The Sirens of Mars, was a New York TimesEditor’s Choice and selected as one of the New York Times 100 Notable Books of 2020.

Dagomar Degroot is an associate professor of environmental history at Georgetown University, and the incoming Baruch S. Blumberg Chair in Astrobiology, Exploration, and Scientific Innovation at the Library of Congress. His first book, The Frigid Golden Age, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2018 and named by the Financial Times as one of the ten best history books of that year. His forthcoming book, Ripples on the Cosmic Ocean, is under contract with Harvard University Press and Viking. He is editing several books on past climate change – including the Oxford Handbook of Resilience in Climate History, and publishes equally in historical and scientific journals, including Nature and the American Historical Review. He writes for a popular audience in, for example, the Washington Post, Aeon Magazine, and The Conversation. He maintains popular online resources on the history of climate change, and has shared the unique perspectives of the past with policymakers, corporate leaders, and journalists in many cities, from Wuhan to Washington, DC.

Dr. Melissa Trainer is a planetary scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) with expertise in the composition of planetary atmospheres and the production of organic molecules and aerosols via in situ synthesis pathways. Dr. Trainer currently serves as a Deputy Principal Investigator (PI) for the Dragonfly mission to Saturn’s moon Titan, part of the NASA Planetary Science New Frontiers Program. She is also the lead for the Dragonfly Mass Spectrometer (DraMS), which enables the investigation of Titan’s surface composition and characterization of potential prebiotic chemistry. Dr. Trainer is a science team member on the Mars Science Laboratory (MSL)/Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) instrument investigation and is working on development for the upcoming NASA DAVINCI Mission to Venus.

Dr. Michael L. Wong is a NASA Sagan Fellow working at the Carnegie Institution for Science’s Earth & Planets Laboratory. His scientific interests include planetary habitability, the emergence of life, and the search for life beyond Earth. In his spare time, he hosts a podcast called Strange New Worlds, which examines science, technology, and culture through the lens of Star Trek.

Dr. Nick Pyenson is lead curator, co-chair, and curator of fossil marine mammals in the Department of Paleobiology at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C. In the past decade, he has worked with and trained over 25 scientists on every continent, collaborating on discoveries that appear frequently in the New York Times, Washington Post, as well as on NPR, CBC, and the BBC. Along with the highest research awards from the Smithsonian, he has also received a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers from the Obama White House. He is also a National Geographic Explorer, a former Kavli Fellow at the National Academies of Sciences, and has worked with the World Economic Forum. He is also the author of the acclaimed non-fiction book Spying on Whales, and co-author with science illustrator Alex Boersma of the children’s book The Whale Who Swam Through Time. He has degrees from Emory University, the University of California, Berkeley, and completed a Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada postdoctoral fellowship at the University of British Columbia.

Photo by Jen Dessinger

Jonathon Keats is an experimental philosopher, artist, and writer whose metadisciplinary projects explore all aspects of society, adapting methods from the sciences and the humanities. He is a research associate at the University of Arizona’s College of Fine Arts, a fellow at the Berggruen Institute, a research fellow at the Highland Institute and the Long Now Foundation, principal philosopher at Earth Law Center, and an artist-in-residence at the SETI Institute, Flux Projects, and Hyundai. He advises the University of Zürich on multidisciplinary studies and co-directs the Consortium for Climate-Adapted Architectural Heritage at the Fraunhofer Institute for Building Physics.

He has exhibited and lectured at dozens of institutions worldwide, from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art to Stanford University to the Triennale di Milano, and from SXSW to CERN to UNESCO. He is the author of six books on subjects ranging from science and technology to art and design – most recently You Belong to the Universe: Buckminster Fuller and the Future, published by Oxford University Press – and is the author of an online art column for Forbes.

Considered by the international press as one of the most active and recognized composers of the musical scene, Felipe Pérez Santiago has received several prizes, awards and recognitions in Europe, United States and Latin America and his music has been commissioned and performed in more than 40 countries. He is founder and artistic director of the Mal’Akh and Vórtice Ensembles, as well as the Vórtice Orchestra, formations specialized in new and non-traditional music focused in bringing chamber and orchestral music to a broader spectrum of listeners. Ha has been appointed as cultural ambassador in Mexico by the UNESCO for his work with youth orchestras, and currently he is the musical director of the “Estudios Churubusco” in Mexico City, the oldest and main film studios in Latin America. He is also the artistic director of “The Earthling Project” which consists in gathering human voices from all over the world to create a sonic legacy that represents humanity and was sent into space on January 8th, 2024, as part of the “Peregrine” mission by the Space Agency Astrobotic in collaboration with NASA, and then landed on the moon with the Odysseus lander in collaboration with Space X.

Bettina Forget is the Director of the SETI Institute’s Artist-in-Residence program. In this capacity she facilitates the collaboration between artists and SETI Institute scientists, foregrounds art-science research, and weaves a network of institutional partners active in art, science, and technology. Her creative practice and academic research examine the re-contextualization of art and science, and how transdisciplinary education may disrupt gender stereotypes. Bettina works with traditional as well as new media arts, focusing on astronomy, sci-fi, and feminism. Her work has been exhibited internationally, including ISEA (Barcelona), CYFEST-13 (Saint Petersburg), and the Planetarium Rio Tinto Alcan (Montreal). Bettina is currently a doctoral candidate in Art Education at Concordia University, Canada, where her project “Imagine Aliens” connects astrobiology, exoplanet research, and art.

Ann Marie Cody is an astronomer with the SETI Institute’s Carl Sagan Center. She obtained a PhD from the California Institute of Technology and subsequently worked at NASA Ames, first as a NASA Postdoctoral Program fellow and later as a research support scientist for the Kepler and K2 Missions. Dr. Cody uses ground-based telescopes and space observatories to explore the diversity of variability behavior in the light of young and unique stars. Her time domain research addresses both the formation conditions of exoplanets, as well as the possibility of intelligent life later arising on them. For the past few years, she has led a program in search of alien megastructures in orbit around sun-like stars.

Under the alias Daedelus, Alfred Darlington has been an instigator of electronic music culture for the past 20+ years. A fore-figure of Los Angeles’ Beat Scene and prolific performer they’re synonymous with controllers, from the Monome to computer-free modular. Founding faculty of Berklee College of Music’s EDI principle instrument program, and proud SETI AIR. Most recently releasing Xenopocene a LP inspired by research with SETI scientists.

Dr. Tripti Bhattacharya is an alum of the STIA program at Georgetown University. She is an organic geochemist and climate scientist. Her work uses ancient molecules in the rock record to understand the response of the water cycle to global climate change. She received her Ph.D. at the University of California, Berkeley, and did her postdoctoral training at the University of Arizona. Her current work focuses on midlatitude circulations in past warm climates, Earth system feedbacks, and the relationship between human evolution and climate change. Her work has been featured in publications like Nature Communications and Science, and she is a Sloan Foundation Fellow and has won an NSF CAREER Award. She has recently been awarded the rank of associate professor and holds a Thonis Family Professorship at Syracuse University.

Lara Vimercati is an environmental microbiologist who studies microbial diversity and adaptation in some of the harshest environments on Earth, considered to be potential analogs for habitable zones on extraterrestrial bodies. Her work combines data from rDNA gene surveys, pure-culture physiological experiments, biogeochemical analyses, microcosm manipulations and comparative genomics and transcriptomics. She has had fieldwork experience in several extreme environments, including the high Atacama Volcanoes, Death Valley, Mt. Kilimanjaro summit, Svalbard and Antarctica.

Dr. Luoth (Lu) Chou is an astrobiologist and instrument scientist in the Planetary Environments Laboratory at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. She is working on developing and implementing organic geochemistry experiments on the Curiosity Rover, which is currently exploring Gale Crater on Mars in search of habitable environments and signatures of life. She also designs and develops flight instruments for planetary exploration, including front-end separation systems to be coupled to high heritage flight mass spectrometers. She is generally interested in new technology, instrumentation, and strategies that can be used to search for life on other planets, including those that are not based on Terran biochemistry—or ‘life as we don’t know it’. Dr. Chou received her B.S. in Microbiology from the University of Maryland at College Park, and her Ph.D. in Earth and Environmental Sciences from the University of Illinois at Chicago where she studied the biogeochemistry of a cryogenic microbial ecosystem in the subsurface of Antarctica.

Marshall Ledford is a Genetics and Astrobiology PhD Candidate in the Meredith Lab at the University of Arizona. His previous work has involved analyzing bacterial DNA from the International Space Station, helping design planetary protection mission concepts, and advocating to congress for increased NASA funding for students. Now, his PhD is focused on understanding how microorganisms influence their environment through trace gas metabolism, with an emphasis on desert, polar, and early Earth ecosystems.

David Grinspoon is an astrobiologist, award-winning science communicator, and prize-winning author. He is currently Senior Scientist for Astrobiology Strategy at NASA where he is working to define the agenda for the future of Astrobiology research and communication. Prior to this he was Senior Scientist at the Planetary Science Institute. His research focuses on climate evolution on Earth-like planets, potential conditions for life elsewhere in the universe, and the planetary scale impacts of human activities on Earth. He is involved with several interplanetary spacecraft missions and is currently on the science team for NASA’s DAVINCI mission which will launch to Venus in 2030. In 2013 he was appointed as the inaugural Chair of Astrobiology at the U.S. Library of Congress where he studied the human impact on Earth systems and organized a public symposium on the Longevity of Human Civilization. He has given dozens of public lectures about climate change in the Solar System. His technical papers have been published in Nature, Science, and numerous other journals, and he has given invited keynote talks at conferences around the world. Grinspoon’s popular writing has appeared in Slate, Scientific American, Natural History, the Washington Post, the Boston Globe, the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times and Sky & Telescope Magazine where for 15 years he wrote the “Cosmic Relief” column. His most recent book is Chasing New Horizons: Inside the Epic First Mission to Pluto, co-authored with Alan Stern. His book Earth in Human Hands was named a Best Science Book of 2016 by NPR’s Science Friday and was a finalist for the AAAS/Subaru SB&F Prize for Excellence in Science Books. His previous book Lonely Planets: The Natural Philosophy of Alien Life won the PEN Center USA Literary Award for Nonfiction. His first book Venus Revealed: A New Look Below the Clouds of our Mysterious Twin Planet was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. He lectures widely, and appears frequently as a science commentator on television, radio and podcasts, including as a frequent guest and host of StarTalk Radio. Also a musician, he leads the House Band of the Universe. Grinspoon was awarded the Carl Sagan Medal for Public Communication of Planetary Science by the American Astronomical Society. In 2022 he was elected as a lifetime Fellow of the American Association of the Advancement of Science. Asteroid 22410 Grinspoon, a main-belt asteroid, is named after him.

Cristina Arista is a cellist from México City, graduated from Mexico’s Nacional Conservatory with further studies in Barcelona and Madrid. With a strong classical education and a lot of orquestal and recording session experience, and as her parents are both musicians and music lovers, she also brings into her interpretive skills and technique a lot of other music genres like Rock, Soul, Jazz, Bolero, Tango and Son Jarocho among others, which gives her a unique and profound sound added to a very sensitive capacity to transmit musically.

Victoria Herrmann is a storyteller and geographer working with communities around the world on climate change adaptation. As a National Geographic Explorer and Assistant Research Professor at Georgetown University, she has spent the past decade leading research initiatives and directing capacity building programs to support communities adapt on the front lines of the climate crisis and safeguard their cultural heritage. In 2016 and 2017, she traveled across the country as lead researcher of America’s Eroding Edges, interviewing 350 local leaders to identify what’s needed most to safeguard coastal communities against the unavoidable climate impacts. Currently, Victoria is the Director of Preserving Legacies: A Future for Our Past, a National Geographic project that empowers communities worldwide with the scientific knowledge and technical training to implement climate adaptation plans to safeguard their cultural heritage.

At Georgetown, Victoria leads a National Science Foundation funded Research Coordination Network on Arctic migrations. A recognized expert in Arctic climate policy, Victoria has testified before the US House and Senate, served as the Alaska Review Editor for the National Climate Assessment, and was named as one of the ‘World’s 100 Most Influential People in Climate Policy’ by Apolitical. She has previously served as the President and Managing Director of The Arctic Institute from 2016 to 2021, a White House Fellow, a Fulbright awardee to Canada, a Carnegie Endowment Junior Fellow, and a Gates Scholar at the University of Cambridge, where she received her PhD.

Rob Dunn is the Senior Vice Provost of University Interdisciplinary Programs and a Reynolds Professor in Applied Ecology at North Carolina State University. As Senior Vice Provost he oversees efforts to spur interdisciplinary scholarship, education and public engagement at NC State. As a scholar, he studies the ecology and evolution of societies and the species with which they interact. This has included projects on the global ecology of sourdough bread, the evolution of sour taste, and the origin of yoghurt microbes, among many others. Dunn has published more than two hundred peer-reviewed articles and more than a hundred magazine and newspaper articles. He has published seven books, including, most recently, A Natural History of the Future and, with Monica Sanchez, Delicious, the Evolution of Flavor and How it Made us Human.

Nadia Drake is a freelance science journalist and former contributing writer at National Geographic. She specializes in covering astronomy, astrophysics and planetary science, as well as anything involving jungles and spiders. Her byline has also appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, Scientific American, Nature, Wired, and Science News; and she was the interim physics editor at Quanta magazine. Nadia frequently hits the road in search of stories and has reported from the jungles of Peru and Indonesian Borneo, the Arctic Ocean, Mars-on-Earth, a flying telescope, the deserts of the Middle East, and the slumping glaciers at Mt. Kilimanjaro’s summit. Nadia has a PhD in genetics from Cornell University, and a graduate certificate in science communication from the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Christopher H. House is a Professor of Geosciences at Penn State, who studies the origin and early evolution of microbial life and the geochemical signatures of such life. He currently is the Director of the Penn State Consortium for Planetary and Exoplanetary Science and Technology and leads the NASA Pennsylvania Space Grant Consortium. Dr. House has research expertise with prebiotic chemistry, microbial evolution, and the carbon isotopic composition of microbial cells. Originally from California, as an undergraduate at UCSD, he spent two years in the origin of life chemistry laboratory of Dr. Stanley L. Miller. Then, Dr. House received his PhD at UCLA with Dr. J. W. Schopf as his advisor. For his graduate work, he studied the carbon isotopic fractionation by various prokaryotes and the composition of the microfossils. During the last 24 years at Penn State, Dr. House has been a participant in four major ocean research cruises and is currently a member of the NASA Mars Science Laboratory Science Team.

Dr. Morgan Cable is a Research Scientist in the Planetary Science Section at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, CA. She is currently the Science Lead for the Exobiology Extant Life Surveyor (EELS) concept and Co-Deputy PI of the Planetary Instrument for X-ray Lithochemistry (PIXL) Instrument aboard the Mars 2020 (Perseverance) rover. She has worked on the Cassini Mission, is a Co-Investigator of the Dragonfly mission to Titan, and is serving multiple roles on Europa Clipper. She was recently appointed as a CIFAR Fellow for the Earth 4D: Subsurface Science and Exploration Program. She previously served as the Ocean Worlds Program Area Scientist for the Planetary Mission Formulation Office, and as supervisor of the Astrobiology and Ocean Worlds Group. Morgan’s research focuses on organic and biomarker detection, through both in situ and remote sensing techniques. She has designed receptor sites for the detection of bacterial spores, the toughest form of life, and developed novel protocols to analyze organic molecules using small, portable microfluidic sensors. Currently Dr. Cable performs laboratory experiments to study the unique organic chemistry of Titan. She and colleagues were the first to discover minerals made exclusively of organics that may exist on Titan’s surface. Morgan also conducts fieldwork in extreme environments on Earth, searching for life in places such as the Atacama Desert, ice fields at the summit of Mt. Kilimanjaro, nutrient-limited lakes at the base of Wind Cave (the densest cave system in the world) in South Dakota, fumarole-generated ice caves of the Mount Meager Volcano in Canada, and lava fields of Iceland.

Erle Ellis is Professor of Geography and Environmental Systems at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC). A Global Highly Cited Researcher, he studies the ecology of human landscapes to inform sustainable stewardship of the biosphere. He teaches environmental science and landscape ecology, which he has also taught at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design. He is a Visiting Fellow at Oxford’s Martin School, Lead Author of the IPBES Transformative Change Assessment, Fellow of the Global Land Programme, Senior Fellow of the Breakthrough Institute, and former member of the Anthropocene Working Group. His book, Anthropocene: A Very Short Introduction, was published in 2018.

Clara Ma is a dual Master’s student at MIT in the Technology Policy Program and Aeronautics and Astronautics departments. Her research involves forecasting the growth of the commercial launch industry in the coming decades, and simulating the resulting emissions and their impacts on atmospheric chemistry using the global atmospheric chemistry model, GEOS-Chem. Clara formerly interned with the FAA’s Office of Commercial Space Transportation, which licenses commercial launches, NASA HQ, and Virgin Galactic. Clara is an alum of Georgetown, a Science, Technology, and International Affairs major, and former President of the Astronomical Society.

With formal training in life sciences and business, Dr. Andy Spry is the only person to have ever held technical management roles in planetary protection in both Europe and the USA. Following early-career commercial experience in the diagnostics and medical device sterilization industries, Dr Spry has spent 20+ years executing the management of spacecraft cleanliness for planetary protection purposes, including 10 years at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where he led the Biotechnology & Planetary Protection Group.

For the last 9 years, Dr Spry has been a planetary protection consultant to NASA, employed by the SETI Institute, with responsibility for providing support to NASA’s Office of Planetary Protection. Currently his activity is focused on policy development, especially for future crewed missions to Mars, but also includes mission responsibilities for e.g., Artemis I and II, and the Artemis I secondary payloads.

Dr. Penelope Boston is currently Portfolio Scientist for New Business and Employee Development (Code S, Science) at NASA Ames Research Center, in the Silicon Valley area of California working to develop research and future mission concepts. She formerly served as Director of the NASA Astrobiology Institute (2016-2020). Boston was Professor and Department Chair of the Earth and Environmental Sciences Dept. at the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology as well as Associate Director of the National Cave and Karst Research Institute (2002-2016).

Personal research areas include geomicrobiology and astrobiology in extreme environments (caves and mines, hot and cold deserts, high latitudes and altitudes); geological processes creating caves on other planets; human life support issues in space/planetary environments; and use of robotics and other technologies to assist exploration and science in extreme Earth and extraterrestrial environments. Boston is author of 250+ technical and popular publications, editor of 4 volumes, and her work has featured in ~300+ print and broadcast media outlets. She has been a NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts Fellow since 2000, received the 2010 Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Speleological Society, the Caving Legend Award from the FSCP/BLM (2012), and is a National Geographic Explorer and Fellow of the California Academy of Sciences. Penny is a poet, artist, animal lover, and friendly.

Maggie Weng is a PhD candidate in the Johnson Biosignatures Lab from Los Angeles, California. Before joining the lab, she graduated from Washington University in St. Louis with a degree in environmental earth science and a minor in writing. Her research is focused on understanding the ecology of hypersaline environments. She has conducted fieldwork at sites in Iceland, Chile, San Diego and Western Australia and uses the tools of metagenomics and metatranscriptomics to probe the “uncultivatable majority” of extreme microbes. She is also the current president of Georgetown’s graduate labor union, the Georgetown Alliance of Graduate Employees (GAGE). When not at work, she writes climate fiction: her work has been published on NASA’s website and by The Los Angeles Review.

Owen Chbani is a Senior at Georgetown University majoring in Science, Technology, and International Affairs and minoring in Arabic from Miami, Florida. He’s currently a Policy Intern at the Commercial Spaceflight Federation. Last summer, he was a Mars Reconnaissance Team intern at NASA’s Science Mission Directorate and has also interned at Voyager Space and the ODNI. He is interested in the intersection of space policy and national security. In addition to being Co-President of the Georgetown Space Initiative, he is the Vice-President of the Georgetown University Wargaming Society and Vice-President of the Astronomical Society.

Zachariah John is an undergraduate studying Science, Technology, and International Affairs at Georgetown University. He is an astrobiology research assistant for the Johnson Biosignatures Lab, studying microbial communities in Mars-analog subterranean lava tubes. He is also a Space Life Sciences Training Program Intern at NASA Ames Research Center and a former intern at the Mars Reconnaissance Team under the Mars Exploration Program at NASA Headquarters.

David Brin is a scientist, tech speaker/consultant, and author. His novels about our survival and opportunities in the near future include EARTH and Existence. A film by Kevin Costner was based on The Postman. His 16 novels, including NY Times Bestsellers and Hugo Award winners, have been translated into more than twenty languages. EARTH foreshadowed global warming, cyberwarfare and the world wide web.

Speaking and advising about how science, technology and evolving values will affect our onrushing future, David has keynoted for IBM, Google, Procter & Gamble, SAP, Microsoft, Qualcomm, Price-Waterhouse, the Mauldin Group and Casey Research, all the way to think-tanks, Homeland Security and the CIA.

An advisor to NASA’s Innovative & Advanced Concepts program, David appears frequently on shows such as Nova and The Universe and Life After People. His first non-fiction book — The Transparent Society: Will Technology Make Us Choose Between Freedom and Privacy? — won the Freedom of Speech Award of the American Library Association. His second nonfiction book is VIVID TOMORROWS: Science Fiction and Hollywood (2021). (Website: http://www.davidbrin.com/ )

Bill Diamond is President and CEO of the SETI Institute, which he joined in 2015. He has worked predominantly in applied technologies with over 20 years’ experience in photonics and optical communications, and more than a decade in X-ray and semiconductor processing technologies. His corporate background spans the spectrum from venture-backed start-ups to Fortune 100 multinationals, with responsibilities ranging from R&D, engineering and operations, to sales, marketing, product management, and CEO positions.

Most recently, Bill was Vice President of Sales for Oclaro, Inc. where he led the company’s penetration in optical networking of the rapidly evolving Web 2.0 Data Center market. Prior to that, he was Vice President of Product Management for optical amplifiers, ROADM, high bit-rate modules, and micro-optics.

Bill held CEO positions at WaveSplitter Technologies, DenseLight Semiconductor, and Xradia, Inc., now part of Zeiss. His photonics background also includes six years with AT&T Bell Laboratory’s Optoelectronics business unit and he served as President of US operations for the Swiss technology company, Comet A.G.

Bill holds a B.A. in Physics from Holy Cross College and a Master’s in Business Administration from Georgetown University. He is a past member of the Advisory Board for the McDonough School of Business Administration at Georgetown and is a current member of the Optical Society of America and the International Astronomical Congress.

Earth at the Crossroads II: A Cosmic Perspective on Environmental Crisis

The Earth at the Crossroads steering committee includes:

Penny Boston

Dagomar Degroot

Bill Diamond

Sarah Johnson

Jonathon Keats

Speakers will include: