Suzanne Staggs is the Henry deWolf Smyth Professor of Physics at Princeton University. She is an experimentalist, with a focus on making and interpreting measurements of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) to inform our understanding of cosmology and particle physics. One of the particular interests of her lab is the development of ever-more-sensitive densely-populated detector modules and associated cryogenic readout components. She is the current director of the Atacama Cosmology Telescope and the current Spokesperson of the Simons Observatory.

Shirley Ho joined the NYU Physics Department as Research Professor and as an Affiliated Faculty at Center for Data Science at NYU in 2021. Ho joined Simons Foundation in 2018 as leader of the Cosmology X Data Science group at CCA and in 2021, she assumed the role of CCA’s interim director. Her research interests have ranged from fundamental cosmological measurements to exoplanet statistics to using machine learning to estimate how much dark matter is in the universe. Ho has broad expertise in theory, observation and data science. Ho’s recent interest has been on understanding and developing novel tools in statistics and machine learning techniques, and applying them to astrophysical challenges. Her goal is to understand the universe’s beginning, evolution and its ultimate fate. In her bidding to understand our Universe, Ho plans, builds and analyzes data from a number of astronomical surveys such as Actacama Cosmology Telescope, Euclid, the Rubin Observatory, Simons Observatory, Sloan Digital Sky Survey and the Roman Space Telescope.
Ho earned her Ph.D. in astrophysical sciences from Princeton University in 2008 and her bachelor’s degrees in computer science and physics from the University of California, Berkeley in 2004. She was a Chamberlain fellow and a Seaborg fellow at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory before joining Carnegie Mellon University in 2011 as an assistant professor. She became the Cooper Siegel Career Development Chair Professor and was appointed associate professor with tenure in 2016. She moved to Lawrence Berkeley Lab as a Senior Scientist in 2016.
Since 2011, she has been a primary mentor to more than 35 postdoctoral fellows, 10 graduate students and 20 undergraduates in the fields of astrophysics, computer science and statistics. She has received several awards including NASA Group Achievement Award, Macronix Prize and Carnegie Science Award. She is also elected a Fellow by the International Astrostatistics Association.

From study of its remnant radiation, we comprehend more about the primordial universe than one might have guessed possible. Knowledge of the present-day universe gives hindsight for modeling the early universe and its dynamics, and measurements of the remnants (called the cosmic microwave background or CMB) provide initial conditions for models. Three powerful space missions have already probed the CMB, and yet there is more to learn from new studies. To compete with the powerful data sets provided from major space missions requires years of observations from bespoke arrays of many thousands of detectors cooled to 100 mK, deployed on special-purpose telescopes in remote and arid sites. With those, however, we can address questions of high energy physics that the biggest accelerators cannot, while also refining our picture of the contents of the more nearby universe and its ongoing evolution.

Suzanne Staggs is the Henry deWolf Smyth Professor of Physics at Princeton University. She is an experimentalist, with a focus on making and interpreting measurements of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) to inform our understanding of cosmology and particle physics. One of the particular interests of her lab is the development of ever-more-sensitive densely-populated detector modules and associated cryogenic readout components. She is the current director of the Atacama Cosmology Telescope and the current Spokesperson of the Simons Observatory

The nature and origin of dark matter continues to baffle physicists. Due to its ghost-like nature we can only infer its existence from its indirect effects on a large scale in the universe around us. Axions make an ideal candidate. They were hypothesized to solve another cosmological puzzle: the fact that the Strong nuclear force seems to be the same regardless of in what direction time flows. Like feeding two cats with one bowl, if axions exist they also turn out to naturally make up the dark matter, permeating the universe as an invisible wave. In recent years, the efforts to build a kind of radio that would tune to this unique frequency has intensified, with conventional techniques failing to look for high frequencies. By arranging materials macroscopically in a clever fashion (so called metamaterials) to engineer a custom plasma, the Axion Longitudinal Plasma Haloscope (ALPHA) will allow for some of the best motivated and most difficult frequencies to be scanned, potentially revealing the nature of dark matter.

Andrea Gallo Rosso (yep, two last names) is an astroparticle physicist. That is, he is fascinated by the story that tiny particles can tell about the Universe and the massive stuff it contains. Theorist by birth, phenomenologist by adoption, his research interests go from supernova neutrinos to dark matter. He strongly believes in the cross-fertilization of the sciences. He is a member of ALPHA and XENON collaborations for direct dark matter search, to which he mainly contributes through statistical inference and data analysis techniques. He currently holds a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Stockholm.

Slava G. Turyshev is an astrophysicist at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), California Institute of Technology and a professor at the Physics and Astronomy Department of the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). Turyshev earned his PhD in astrophysics from the Moscow State University in 1990. His primary research areas include gravitational physics, research in relativistic astrophysics, astronomy, and planetary science. He is an expert in high-precision spacecraft navigation, solar system dynamics, lunar laser ranging, and related technology efforts. Turyshev served as the NASA Project Scientist on the CNES/ESA Microscope mission (2016-2020); JPL Project Scientist for the Advanced Lunar Laser Ranging Facility at the Table Mountain Observatory, CA (2015-ongoing); Principal Investigator on the investigation of the Pioneer Anomaly (2003-2012). Currently, he is the Principal Investigator on the 2020 NIAC Phase III effort investigating the use the solar gravitation lens for multipixel imaging and spectroscopy of exoplanets. He has published over 250 papers, 2 books. In 2020 Turyshev was elected a member of the International Academy of Astronautics.

Missions to the outer planets are an important part of NASA's goals as they will enable us to better understand the formation and evolution of our solar system. However, outer solar system exploration has been quite limited in our sixty years of space exploration due to the high cost, long travel time and narrow window for mission implementation. Solar sails may offer a drastically new approach for deep space exploration paving the way to low cost and fast-transit missions. Nevertheless, owing to very stringent mass requirement, solar sails have limited capability for science payloads when compared to a flagship class mission spacecraft. We are developing a mission concept using ScienceCraft, which integrates a science instrument and spacecraft into one monolithic and lightweight structure, to address the mass constraints of typical solar sails. By printing an innovative spectrometer based on quantum dots directly on the solar sail material, we create a breakthrough spacecraft architecture allowing an unprecedented parallelism and throughput of data collection, and rapid travel across the solar system. Unlike conventional solar sails that serve only to propel small cubesats, ScienceCraft puts its vast area at use for spectroscopy, pushing the boundary of scientific exploration of outer solar system.

Mahmooda Sultana is an instrument scientist at the Planetary Environments Lab at NASA Goddard Spaceflight Center. She received her PhD in Chemical Engineering from Massachusetts Institute of Technology and BSc in Chemical Engineering from the University of Southern California with Summa Cum Laude. She joined the Detector Systems Branch at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in 2010, where she worked in the Detector Development Laboratory (DDL) to develop advanced semiconductor devices, including x-ray detectors, Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems (MEMS) and the Microshutter Array for the James Webb Space Telescope. Mahmooda joined the Instrument Systems Engineering Branch as the Associate Branch Head in 2017 and worked on several instrument and mission concept development efforts as an Instrument Systems Engineer, along with managing the branch. In addition, she has been leading the development of multiple nanomaterial-based instruments as the PI, including a Multifunctional Nanosensor Platform funded by the Early Career Initiative (ECI) at STMD and the Polaris program at HEOMD, and Quantum Dot-based Multispectral Imager funded by the ROSES program at SMD. In 2021, she joined the planetary environments laboratory as an instrument scientist. Some of her awards include 2021 Innovation Award from STMD, 2017 GSFC IRAD Innovator of the Year, 2021 ETD Craig R. Tooley award, 2019 Robert H. Goddard award for technical excellence, 2018 Robert H. Goddard team award, NASA Early Career Achievement Medal, ISTD New Achiever Medal, Bell Laboratories research fellowship, and WmC and Margaret H Rousseau fellowship at MIT and NSF graduate research fellowship.

As described in the 2022 Planetary Decadal Survey, the outer Solar System contains a wealth of fascinating targets. The main drawback to exploring these worlds is the long transit time (~decades), often combined with restrictions imposed by the need to use a Jupiter gravity assist. Small fast sailcraft could solve the transit time problem, opening up a plethora of possibilities. I will discuss four examples of the science which could be enabled by fast flybys: the successful New Horizons flyby of Pluto; a Triton flyby; a combined Uranian moon and Kuiper belt flyby mission; and a comet/interplanetary interceptor. I will also discuss the implementation challenges imposed by mass and spacecraft velocity constraints.

Francis Nimmo's research covers the interiors and evolution of solid planetary bodies. He received his BA in 1993 and his PhD in 1996, both from Cambridge University, and joined the faculty at UCSC in 2005. He was awarded the Urey Prize and Macelwane medal in 2007, and elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2020. He has participated in the Cassini, New Horizons, GRAIL and InSight spacecraft missions, and is on three Europa Clipper instrument teams. He served on the Steering Committee for the 2022 Planetary Science and Astrobiology Decadal Survey.

Much of our space exploration efforts are devoted to one-off missions with major investments in each. This is a great strategy for early investigations of clearly significant planetary and small body destinations, but we have an entire Solar System to interrogate and the pace has definitely been slow to date. We are in the dawning era of much smaller spacecraft, and the potential to gather data from multiple destinations over longer time spans with a heightened cadence of missions to allow us to conduct survey-style investigations of the vast number of objects that attend our particular star. If we think of solar systems as belonging to one of two classes, i.e. life-bearing or not life-bearing, then the presence of some sort of biological or prebiological phenomenon on any individual body in a system places that system in the first category. The emergence of life can then be considered as a solar system-wide property and the entire suite of ingredients and processes that go into kindling of life anywhere within that system is of interest. This ranges from bodies with prebiotic chemistry through to full-blown biospheres. Thus, all bodies in a solar system are part of the milieu within which life occurs. Can the idea of low-cost solar sail-propelled spacecraft deployed en masse be useful for something as hard to investigate as life-like phenomena and their precursors? Perhaps, the answer is yes, and we must give serious attention to the possibilities.

DPenelope Boston is currently Associate Director for Science Business Development (Code S, Science) at NASA Ames Research Center, in the Silicon Valley area of California helping to develop research and missions concepts. 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. Formerly, Boston served as Director of the NASA Astrobiology Institute (NAI, 2016-2019), and she 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). She is a poet, artist, animal adorer, and friendly.

Tom Kalil is Chief Innovation Officer at Schmidt Futures. In this role, Tom leads initiatives to harness technology for societal challenges, improve science policy, and identify and pursue 21st century moonshots. Prior to Schmidt Futures, Tom served in the White House for two Presidents (Obama and Clinton), helping to design and launch national science and technology initiatives in areas such as nanotechnology, the BRAIN initiative, data science, materials by design, robotics, commercial space, high-speed networks, access to capital for startups, high-skill immigration, STEM education, learning technology, startup ecosystems, and the federal use of incentive prizes.
From 2001 to 2008, Kalil was Special Assistant to the Chancellor for Science and Technology at UC Berkeley. He launched a program called Big Ideas@Berkeley, which provide grants to student-led teams committed to solving important problems at home and abroad. In 2007 and 2008, Kalil was the Chair of the Global Health Working Group for the Clinton Global Initiative, where he developed new public and private sector initiatives in areas such as maternal and child health, under-nutrition, and vaccines.
Prior to joining the Clinton White House, Tom was a trade specialist at the Washington offices of Dewey Ballantine, where he represented the Semiconductor Industry Association on U.S.-Japan trade issues and technology policy. He also served as the principal staffer to Gordon Moore in his capacity as Chair of the SIA Technology Committee.
Tom received a B.A. in political science and international economics from the University of Wisconsin at Madison, and completed graduate work at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy.

Steve Croft grew up in England, where he received a PhD in astrophysics from Oxford University in 2002, before moving to California to work as a postdoctoral researcher at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Since 2007, Croft has been a researcher at UC Berkeley.
Croft's research has included the study of supermassive black holes and their environments, as a principal investigator for both the Hubble and Spitzer Space Telescopes, in addition to over 100 nights on ground-based optical and infrared telescopes including Keck and the Lick 3-meter. He has performed surveys for variable and transient radio sources with the Allen Telescope Array, the Very Large Array, and the Murchison Widefield Array, and looked for the signatures of black hole collisions as a member of the NANOGrav collaboration.
Croft has been a full-time scientist on the Breakthrough Listen program since 2015. He serves as Listen's Project Scientist for the Green Bank Telescope, and is the Director of the NSF-funded Berkeley SETI Research Center "Research Experience for Undergraduates" Site. He is also involved in many aspects of the planning, execution, analysis, and publication of results from the program, as well as proposal writing, documentation, coordinating and writing press releases, donor cultivation, industry engagement, outreach, education, and social media.

The search for life in the universe has grown and evolved significantly since the first modern efforts in the 1960's with Project Ozma. Today, astrobiology, including SETI, can draw upon decades of theoretical, experimental, and observational work that helps us understand the limits of life-as-we-know it, and has given us some weak but significant upper limits on the presence of biological life and technology both in the Solar System and beyond it.
Two primary and complementary modes of life detection are searches for biosignatures and searches for technosignatures. These modes often have striking differences in the assumptions, philosophies, and techniques they employ, and the communities that pursue them have often worked in parallel, with little communication or cross-fertilization. That said, they also share many important commonalities in their assumptions, philosophies, and so would benefit from tighter collaboration.
In this talk, I will outline some of these issues, and address some common misconceptions regarding the relative merits of the two approaches. I will argue both communities have much to learn from each other, that both approaches deserve similar levels of support and effort. I will highlight and applaud the recent move to accept searches for technosignatures back under the broader umbrella of astrobiology.

Jason Wright is a professor of astronomy and astrophysics at Penn State, a member of the Center for Exoplanets and Habitable Worlds, and director of the Penn State Extraterrestrial Intelligence Center. He works on a variety of problems related to stars, their planets, and life in the universe. His work in SETI includes searches for signs of extraterrestrial industry via waste heat (e.g. Dyson Spheres), and the development of curricula in the field. He also studies stars, their atmospheres, their activity, and their planets. He is an Instrument Team Project Scientist for NEID, a PI of NExSS, a co-PI of MINERVA, and a member of the Habitable Zone Planet Finder team.

Noemie Globus

UC Santa Cruz

The Chiral Puzzle of Life

While biologists have not yet reached a consensus on the definition of life, homochirality - the specific molecular handedness of biomolecules - is a phenomenon only produced by life. The unraveling of its origin requires interdisciplinary research, by exploring each of fundamental physics, modern chemistry, astrophysics, and biology. We will discuss the origin of biological homochirality in the context of astrophysics and particle physics. Most of our radiation dose from cosmic rays comes from muons that are formed in a decay involving the weak force. Because parity is violated in muon production, the muons are magnetically polarized on average. Earth is the only body in the solar system where muons dominate the cosmic radiation at ground level. Recent ideas connecting the chirality of cosmic muons to a chiral bias in biological processes will be presented.

Noemie Globus is a theoretical astrophysicist and a Chancellor's Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where she conducts interdisciplinary research on the role of cosmic radiation in the emergence of life, involving knowledge from different fields. The goal of her research is to understand if natural, spin-polarized cosmic radiation can act as a chiral evolutionary pressure.​ Her other topics of interest are in high energy astrophysics: she studies the formation of relativistic jets around spinning black holes, and the origin of ultra-high energy cosmic rays.

The search for technosignatures - remotely observable indicators of advanced extraterrestrial life - addresses one of the most profound questions in science: are we alone in the universe as intelligent life? The Breakthrough Listen program is leading the most concerted search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) effort to-date through radio and optical surveys of nearby stars, nearby galaxies and the Milky Way galactic plane, thus representing the best chance the human race has ever had to detect a technosignature. Recently, Breakthrough Listen has partnered with the SETI Institute to develop commensal SETI search capabilities on some of the most sensitive radio inteferometers, including the Very Large Array (VLA) and MeerKAT. Interferometric radio telescopes have the advantage of providing a larger field of view, maximizing the SETI survey speed. The VLA search will be operating alongside latter portions of the third epoch of the VLA Sky Survey (VLASS), allowing us to monitor over 1 million nearby stars within the next few years. In this talk, we will present the latest updates on these surveys and conclude with a refreshed outlook on SETI search using next generation telescope facilities.

Cherry Ng is a research associate at the Dunlap Institute for Astronomy & Astrophysics, jointly affiliated with the SETI Institute and UC Berkeley. During her PhD study, she discovered 60 rapidly-spinning neutron stars with the Parkes Radio Telescope in Australia. She then worked on the Canadian CHIME telescope, using it to detect and study “Fast Radio Bursts”, a new astrophysical mystery that involves short bursts of radio waves that have come from far outside our Milky Way galaxy. Her hunting effort continues, now in the area of technosignature (SETI). She is the project scientist for the MeerKAT and the Very Large Array (VLA) SETI projects. She and her team use these two sensitive radio telescope facilities to attempt to answer the question of whether there are other advanced extraterrestrial civilizations in the Universe.

Natalie Batalha is a professor of physics and astronomy at San Jose State University in the heart of Silicon Valley, California and co-investigator on NASA's Kepler Mission. She holds a bachelor's in physics from the University of California (UC), Berkeley and a doctorate in astrophysics from UC Santa Cruz. Batalha started her career as a stellar spectroscopist studying young, sun-like stars. After a post-doctoral fellowship in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Batalha returned to California. Inspired by the growing number of exoplanet discoveries she joined the team led by William Borucki at NASA's Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, Calif., working on transit photometry -- an emerging technology for finding exoplanets. As a member of the Kepler team, Batalha is responsible for the selection of the more than 150,000 stars the spacecraft monitors and works closely with team members at Ames to identify viable planet candidates from Kepler photometry. As Director of the Systems Teaching Institute at the NASA Research Park, Batalha is responsible for creating programs and resources for students pursuing careers in fields relevant to the mission of NASA Ames.

UC Santa Cruz was founded in 1965 as the movement away from the conservative '50s was in full swing and America was experiencing a transformation. The founding faculty, administrators, and students embraced and embodied this change. They were open and revolutionary in their thinking—more than mere radicals, they dared to imagine a living and learning environment that would foster a community whose passion came from a deep sense of social justice. UC Santa Cruz is a public university like no other in California, combining the intimacy of a small, liberal arts college with the depth and rigor of a major research university.

Dave DeBoer's research interests relate to instrumentation to explore the radio Universe. Currently this relates to building instrumentation for early Universe studies (Epoch of Reionization) and then trying to use them for planetary studies as well. From his past work on spectrum management, he also use instruments to help characterize the radio frequency environment. DeBoer helps manage the undergraduate lab facilities, with access to the new 4.2m radio cm-wave radio telescope.

The Radio Astronomy Laboratory (RAL) was created in 1958 to foster research in radio astronomy, a discipline that naturally extends beyond the borders of traditional academic departments at Berkeley. Over the years, faculty and graduate students from the Astronomy, Physics, Chemistry, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, and Geology and Geophysics departments have made use of the RAL's facilities.
The main activity of the RAL has been to build and maintain a radio astronomy observatory at Hat Creek, near Mt. Lassen, supported by on-campus laboratory facilities in Campbell Hall. The current observatory is a state-of-the-art array of ten radio telescopes (the BIMA array) that operate at millimeter wavelengths, one of only four such facilities in the world. The signals from the antennas are combined to make images of cosmic radio sources. In July 1998, the RAL entered into an agreement with the SETI Institute of Mountain View California to design, build and operate an array of radio telescopes of a radically new design operating at centimeter wavelengths, known as the Allen Telescope Array (ATA). The BIMA Array will soon be moved to a site in the Inyo Mountains and combined with the six telescopes of Caltech's OVRO array to form a new, more powerful instrument known as CARMA. The RAL will thus be operating two observatories capable of making observations from frequencies of 300 MHz to nearly 300 GHz, or nearly 10 octaves in frequency.

Harry Atwater is the Otis Booth Leadership Chair, Division of Engineering and Applied Science, Howard Hughes Professor of Applied Physics and Materials Science, and Director, Liquid Sunlight Alliance at the California Institute of Technology. Atwater’s scientific interests span light-matter interactions from quantum nanophotonics, two-dimensional materials and metasurfaces to solar photovoltaics and artificial photosynthesis. Atwater is an early pioneer in nanophotonics and plasmonics; he gave the name to the field of plasmonics in 2001. He currently serves as Director of the Liquid Sunlight Alliance, a DOE Solar Fuels Hub project, and was the founding Director of the Resnick Sustainability Institute at Caltech. He also chairs the Breakthrough Starshot Lightsail Committee and is a PI of the Caltech Space Solar Power Project.

Caltech is a world-renowned science and engineering institute that marshals some of the world's brightest minds and most innovative tools to address fundamental scientific questions and pressing societal challenges. The Institute manages JPL for NASA, sending probes to explore the planets of our solar system and quantify changes on our home planet. Caltech also owns and operates large-scale research facilities such as the Seismological Laboratory and a global network of astronomical observatories, including the Palomar and W. M. Keck Observatories; and cofounded and comanages LIGO. Caltech is an independent, privately supported institution with a 124-acre campus located in Pasadena, California.

Simon Peter “Pete” Worden, (Brig. Gen., USAF, Ret., PhD) is the Chairman of the Breakthrough Prize Foundation and Executive Director of the foundation’s Breakthrough Initiatives. He holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Physics and Astronomy from the University of Michigan and a PhD in Astronomy from the University of Arizona. Prior to joining the Breakthrough Prize Foundation, Dr. Worden was Director of NASA’s Ames Research Center at Moffett Field, California until his retirement on March 31, 2015. He has held several positions in the United States Air Force and was research professor of astronomy at the University of Arizona, Tucson, USA. He is a recognized expert on space and science issues, both civil and military, and has been a leader in building partnerships between governments and the private sector internationally.

Mr. Klupar has worked in the Aerospace Industry for more than 35 years. Holding positions in Government (US Air force and NASA) and industry( startups to multinational corporations). Prior to being the Engineering Director at the Breakthrough Foundation, Mr. Klupar was Director of Engineering at NASA’s Ames Research Center. While at Ames he helped develop the Aquila, LADEE, TESS, Pharmasat, OREO and other small spacecraft missions while aiding in the development and operations of Kepler and SOFIA projects.

Kyran currently works as the Associate Director at the Breakthrough Initiatives. He has an LLM from the international institute of air and space law in Leiden, the Netherlands. He is an avid member of SGAC and a former representative at the European Centre for Space Law.