The Tarter Award

Timeline for the 2026 Tarter Award:

1. Eligibility: This award is open to any individual(s) whose innovative contributions have had a demonstrated impact on the search for life beyond Earth. Individuals serving on the Selection Committee (see #4) will not be eligible. Generally, a nominee’s contribution or ways of measuring its impact should have been published, at least in part, in refereed journals, or have undergone some equivalent form of review by experts.
   
   
2. Solicitations for nominations (including self-nomination) will be widely distributed each year. A nomination will consist of a letter of no more than 2 pages, outlining the reasons the nominee deserves the award, 2 letters of support by someone other than the nominee, the nominee’s CV, including examples of peer-reviewed publications or the equivalent appropriate to the nominee’s field of work.  A current address and other contact information for both the nominee and the nominator should be clearly specified. The most successful nominations are likely to come from individuals who are familiar with the mission of the SETI Institute and the role of SETI research in promoting a wider perspective on humanity’s future. Nominations will remain eligible for three years after first submission.
   
   
3. All nominations will receive a preliminary review by a group appointed by the SETI Institute CEO, consisting of senior scientists and staff of the Institute.  Inappropriate nominations will be discarded, and remaining nominations will be evaluated by the Tarter Award Selection Committee, described below.
   
   
4. This Selection Committee shall be appointed for renewable three-year terms by the SETI Institute CEO, who will seek the advice of the Institute’s Science Council and/or Science Advisory Board as necessary.  Over time, the committee will consist of an eclectic group of experts with diverse professional and cultural backgrounds.  If the Selection Committee is unable to decide upon an awardee from the submitted nominations, they may solicit and examine additional nominations, or defer the selection of a recipient to the next cycle.
   
   
5. The Selection Committee shall recommend an Awardee(s) to the SETI Institute Board of Trustees, which will make the final determination for the award.
   
   
6. The Award recipient will receive a financial award, recognition on a perpetual award plaque located at the SETI Institute, and an appropriate keepsake award. Travel expenses will be provided for the Award recipient to attend a designated event featuring the Award and its recipient. 
   
   
7. Each winner of the Tarter Award will also be recognized through an international news release issued by the SETI Institute.
   
   
8. The SETI Institute seeks to establish the Tarter Endowment, which will support the expenses of the annual Tarter Award, and, it is hoped, will ultimately grow to provide permanent ongoing support for innovative SETI endeavors at the SETI Institute.

All nominations should be submitted via email to [email protected].

Nomination packets must include:

• A formal letter (maximum two pages) describing the compelling reasons the nominee merits the award.
• Two letters of support provided by individuals other than the nominee.
• The nominee's full Curriculum Vitae (CV).

The 2026 Tarter Award recipient will be publicly honored at a SETI Institute event and will receive $100,000 in recognition of their achievement.

Natalie Batalha
Professor of Astronomy & Astrophysics and Director of Astrobiology at UC Santa Cruz. She uses ground and space-based telescopes to find and characterize planets orbiting other stars in the galaxy, with the ultimate goal of searching for evidence of life beyond the Solar System. Prior to UCSC, Dr. Batalha was a research scientist at NASA Ames where she served as Science Team Lead and Project Scientist for NASA’s Kepler mission. She led the team that discovered the first confirmed rocky exoplanet (Kepler-10b). Over the next decade, she played a central role in expanding the Kepler catalog of discoveries and guiding the team through the statistical analyses that demonstrated the prevalence of potentially habitable planets in our Galaxy. For her work on Kepler, Batalha was awarded a NASA Public Service Medal (2011) and the Smithsonian Ingenuity Award (2017). Most recently, Batalha led the team that achieved the first definitive detection of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere of an exoplanet (WASP-39b), a breakthrough that showcased the James Webb Space Telescope’s extraordinary power to probe alien skies and ushered in a new era of atmospheric exploration.

Jim Bildner
CEO of the Draper Richards Kaplan Foundation, Bildner is also an adjunct lecturer in Public Policy at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government, and a senior research fellow at the Center for Public Leadership at Harvard University. He joined The Kresge Foundation Board of Trustees in 2005.

Andrew Fraknoi
Member of the SETI Institute's Board of Directors and its Science Advisory Board, Andrew Fraknoi retired recently as the Chair of the Astronomy Program at Foothill College. He served as Executive Director of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific for 14 years, and is the Lead Author of OpenStax “Astronomy”, the most-frequenly assigned introductory astronomy textbook in North America.

Amaresh Kollipara
Emmy-nominated VR producer and space industry executive with a multidisciplinary background. He recently led a project called Mission:ISS at Facebook's VR company Oculus. This project was conducted in collaboration with NASA and is a true-to-life simulation of the International Space Station in VR. In addition, he is a Founder and Managing Partner of Earth2Orbit, LLC, which is an advisory firm with a satellite industry focus. He strongly feels that the future of commercial space, and the future of humanity's relationship with space, is dependent on the development of useful applications based on space infrastructure. He currently serves on the Board of the SETI Institute and the Space Frontier Foundation. He served as a Principal of the Space Angels Network, a professionally managed global network of investors.

Frank Levinson
General Partner and Managing Director, Small World Group. An American entrepreneur and investor, Levinson is best known for being co-founder of Finisar Corporation.

Sunil Nagaraj
Sunil Nagaraj is the Founder and Managing Partner of Ubiquity Ventures, a seed-stage institutional venture capital firm with almost $200 million under management and a focus on "software beyond the screen" startups. Before Ubiquity, Sunil was with Bessemer Venture Partners, where he led seed rounds for companies like Auth0 (acquired by Okta) and Zapier, and invested in Rocket Lab and Twitch. He previously founded Triangulate, a machine-learning-driven dating startup. Sunil holds an MBA from Harvard Business School and a BS in Computer Science from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is a Past President of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific. He spends his free time playing piano, sailing, and nerding out on new technologies.

Gregory Papadopoulos
Currently a Partner, New Enterprise Associates, Papadopoulos is an American engineer, executive, venture capitalist, and former Chair of the Board of Directors of the SETI Institute. He is the creator and lead proponent for Redshift, a theory on whether technology markets are over or under-served by Moore's Law.

Shelley Wright
Professor of Astronomy & Astrophysics at the University of California San Diego. Research focuses on the development of advanced astronomical instrumentation and observations with some of the world’s largest optical and infrared telescopes. Prof. Wright specializes in the design and fabrication of innovative optical and near-infrared cameras and spectrographs.

Prof. Wright has been involved in the development of instrumentation and observational programs for the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) for more than twenty years. Current efforts include new technologies to search for fast optical transients and potential technosignatures from advanced civilizations.

Currently, Prof. Wright is the Principal Investigator of the Panoramic SETI Observatory (PANOSETI); the Principal Investigator of Liger, a next-generation adaptive-optics imager and integral-field spectrograph for the W. M. Keck Observatory; and the Project Scientist for IRIS, the first-light instrument for the future Thirty Meter Telescope International Observatory.