SMCAS Monthly Meeting with Presentation by Dr. Sofia Sheikh, Technosignature Research Scientist, SETI

The San Mateo County Astronomical Society holds their monthly meetings the first Friday of most months at the College of San Mateo. We gather at 7 p.m. in the Integrated Science Center, room 110, for a pizza party. We then move to the Planetarium at 8 p.m. for a speaker's presentation.

This month's presentation is called, "Searching for Technological Life in the Universe." 

Are we alone? Or is there other life out there in the universe beyond Earth? If there is other life, is it complex life, capable of using language and creating technology like us? Dr. Sofia Sheikh seeks to answer this question by using facilities like SETI Institute's Allen Telescope Array to search for “technosignatures,” or signs of non-human technology elsewhere in the universe. In this talk, Dr. Sheikh will describe the current status of technosignature searches, including the history of the field of the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, the progress we’ve made so far in searching for extraterrestrial signals, and the cutting-edge surveys and instruments that will advance our understanding in the years to come.

Dr. Sofia Sheikh is a radio astronomer who works on the search for “technosignatures” SETI, as well as fast radio bursts, pulsars, and characterization of radio frequency interference. She completed her bachelor’s degrees in physics and astronomy at the University of California, Berkeley in 2017, and went on to earn dual doctorates, one in Astronomy and Astrophysics and the other in Astrobiology at Penn State University in 2021. She led radio campaigns with S.E.T.I. Institute’s Allen Telescope Array as a National Science Foundation’s, Mathematical and Physical Sciences Ascending Postdoctoral Research Fellowship and now works with the S.E.T.I. Institute as a Technosignature Research Scientist. She hopes, through her career, to help us learn more about the distribution of technological life in the galaxy.