Seti astronomer lectures on "Hunting Down the Extraterrestrials"

Posted 12/05/00

Seth Shostak, an astronomer and public program scientist at the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) Institute, will speak at Dartmouth on Friday, Dec. 8, on "Hunting Down the Extraterrestrials." The lecture, the third in the Millennial Mind Symposium sponsored by Dartmouth's Center for Cognitive Neuroscience, will be in Filene Auditorium in Moore Hall.

As a public programs scientist, Shostak serves as the primary liaison between the SETI Institute and the general public, speaking and writing extensively about the Institute's work. Fascinated with astronomy since he was a young boy, he has spent much of his career conducting radio astronomy research on galaxies. For more than a decade, he worked at the Kapteyn Astronomical Institute in Groningen, Netherlands. The author of some fifty papers in professional journals, Shostak also has written several hundred popular articles on various topics in astronomy, technology, film and television. His book "Sharing the Universe: Perspectives on Extraterrestrial Live," was published in 1998.

For more than thirty years Shostak has produced his own films, many of them popular science pieces used for television. He found and ran a computer animation firm in the Netherlands that made leaders in short films for networks and other video producers, and he now lecturers on astronomy and other subjects at the California Academy of Sciences.

Shostak gives hundreds of presentations annually in educational in corporate settings, and he is a distinguished speaker for the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics. He appears frequently as a commentator on CNN, The Discovery Channel and PBS.

See also: Advanced Aliens: Why ET Will Be More Advanced than Humanity (article by Seth Shostak at space.com) and an ABC NEWS interview with Shostak.