Shostak Biography

Seth holds a degree in physics from Princeton University, and a Ph.D. in astronomy from the California Institute of Technology. For much of his career, he has conducted radio astronomy research on galaxies, and has published approximately forty papers in professional journals. For more than a decade, he worked at the Kapteyn Astronomical Institute, in Groningen, The Netherlands, using the Westerbork Radio Synthesis Telescope.

He has also written several hundred popular articles on various topics in astronomy, technology, film and television. For more than thirty years, Seth has been producing his own films, many of them popular among science pieces used for television. He founded and ran a computer animation firm in Holland that made leaders and short films for networks and other video producers, and now lectures on astronomy and other subjects at the California Academy of Sciences.

Seth is the Public Programs Scientist at the SETI Insititute, in Mountain View, California.