SETI InstituteDr. Kayla Iacovino studies how life-essential elements like carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and sulfur drive magmatic processes that help form atmospheres, maintain climate, and create chemical disequilibria that life can exploit.
Dr. Milan Gošić is a solar physicist who has been working on the spatio-temporal evolution of the solar magnetic fields using multi-instrument, multiwavelength observations. His field of expertise is space and ground solar observations, data processing, and data analysis.
Dr. Mia Mace’s scientific research interests lie in numerical modeling of planetary ring systems, and her doctoral work focused on developing code to simulate and analyze the dynamics of charged dust grains in Saturn’s rings in response to questions about ring rain and spokes.
Emilie Simpson is an early-career scientist with a research background in exoplanetary science and planetary habitability. Her master’s work primarily involved using TESS data products to study the behavior of variable host stars and how that behavior could affect their exoplanets.
Dr. Pablo Sobron is a Research Scientist at the SETI Institute, the Founder and CEO of Impossible Sensing, and a world expert in spectroscopy. He has invented sensors to explore the solar system and the deep sea, and has commercialized spin-off solutions in the energy, agriculture, and critical minerals markets.
Dr. Kai Yang is a solar physics researcher focused on the Sun's dynamic activity. His work investigates the mechanisms of coronal heating, the complex magnetic topology that structures the corona, and the instabilities that trigger solar and stellar flares.
Dr. Isabel Angelo earned her doctorate in 2025 from UCLA where she worked at the intersection of machine learning, physical models, and statistical methods to search for planets, binary stars, and anomalies in datasets including Kepler and Gaia.
Coral Clark has over 30 years of experience in education, including 10 years of classroom science instruction and 25 years in teacher professional development. She has contributed to science curricula at the SETI Institute, including the integrated science curriculum, Voyages Through Time.
Dr. Kimberly Bott received her PhD from the University of New South Wales, working on exoplanet polarimetry (observation and computational modeling). Subsequently, she held postdoc positions at the Virtual Planetary Laboratory and UC Riverside.
Currently, Dr. Bott is investigating the observability of terrestrial exoplanets in polarized light with contemporary and near-future telescopes and how the method might be used to map those worlds.
Dr. Ross Beyer studies planetary surfaces, working on ways to quantitatively analyze the meter-scale topography and surface roughness via remote sensing. This work has been used to help plan landing sites on Mars and the Moon.
