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As a child, what did you want to do when you grew up?

At age 8, I wanted to be an engineer because it was the most male profession I knew about. At the time, my mother thought I should spend more time with her, rather than hunting and fishing with my dad, so I could learn about “girl things”. I was furious!

Explain your work in one easy paragraph.

We are searching for extraterrestrial intelligent life, but we don’t have any way of detecting intelligence across the vast distances that separate the stars. So we use large telescopes to try to observe how distant technologies may have modified their environment in ways that we can observe, and we also attempt to detect signals that may have been sent in our direction.

What do you love most about what you do?

I love trying to figure out how to do our search better and faster and in new ways. I also love to talk about what I do with people all over the planet. If we all see ourselves as Earthlings, then it may be possible to cooperate on a global scale to solve the enormous challenges we face.

How did you end up working in this field?

It was an accident. When I was a student, I learned how to program the University of California, Berkeley’s first desktop computer. Many years later, the computer was donated to Stuart Bowyer to use in a SETI project. He didn’t know how to use it, so he recruited me. The opportunity to try to answer this huge question about extraterrestrial life hooked me and I’ve stayed hooked ever since.

Were you good at science at school?

Yes. I was lucky to have a great physics teacher who also substituted for my dad, who died when I was 12.

How has your field of study changed in the time you have been working in it?

There have been two major game changers: exoplanets and extremophiles. When we started, we had no idea whether other stars had planets. Today, we know that planets are everywhere. We also thought that the conditions that could support life were those that humans enjoy. But we have explored the most extreme environments on Earth and been astonished to discover life everywhere we look, as long as there is liquid water. This suggests there is a lot of potentially habitable real estate out there.

Which discovery or achievement do you wish you’d made yourself?

The discovery of 51 Pegasi b, the first exoplanet around a sun-like star.

If you could have a conversation with any scientist, living or dead, who would it be?

It has to be Albert Einstein. I’d love to understand how he could invent new physics just by doing thought experiments.

What scientific development do you hope to see in your lifetime?

I think the 21st century will be the century of biology on Earth and beyond. But that may be a bit longer than my lifetime.

What’s the most exciting thing you’ve worked on in your career?

Actually carrying out the search at observatories around the world, and then building the Allen Telescope Array in a way that has become a template for future large radio telescopes.

“There is a lot of potentially habitable real estate out there in the universe”

Do you have an unexpected hobby, and if so, please will you tell us about it?

I love to dance the samba with my husband.

What’s the best thing you’ve read or seen in the past 12 months?

Stories of Your Life and Others by Ted Chiang. One of the short stories is the basis for the film Arrival. The idea that writing in circles, as the aliens do in this story, requires knowledge of the future is intriguing.

How useful will your skills be after the apocalypse?

I’m hopeful that propagating the meme of being an Earthling will help prevent the apocalypse.

OK, one last thing: tell us something that will blow our minds…

You are literally made of stardust.