She is a theoretical physicist and astrobiologist and received her PhD in Physics from Dartmouth College and has held postdoctoral appointments in the Center for Chemical Evolution at the Georgia Institute of Technology and as a NASA Postdoctoral Program Fellow. Her research focuses on the emergence of life, but she is broadly interested in topics as diverse as the structure of information hierarchies in biological systems, astrobiological searches for life elsewhere in the cosmos, the dynamics underlying major evolutionary transitions, cancer biology, quantum mechanics and space exploration. Her topic will be, “The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence in the 21st Century: Moving Beyond Radio Astronomy?”.