AAS Member Receives SETI Forward Award

This post is adapted from a SETI Institute press release:

The SETI Institute in Mountain View, California, has announced the 2020 and 2021 recipients of its SETI Forward awards, recognizing outstanding undergraduate interns studying astrobiology and the search for life beyond Earth. Among them is AAS member Karen Isabel Perez (Columbia University). The award provides scholarship funds to support the next generation of scientists pursuing SETI (search for extraterrestrial intelligence) and astrobiology career opportunities and connects promising students with researchers.

Karen Perez is a 2nd-year astronomy grad student from Houston, Texas, studying pulsars. She received her bachelor’s degree from Cornell University in 2019 and interned at Breakthrough Listen that summer, testing and improving a pulsar search pipeline and producing observation catalogs and scripts for a galactic center survey. The internship helped reinforce her passion for radio astronomy and opened her eyes to the possibilities of using radio telescopes to look for technosignatures. Since then, she has continued to work with the team as a visiting graduate student, conducting observations and analyzing data. Karen is the recipient of the 2020 SETI Forward award, which was postponed due to the COVID-19 shutdowns and which provides a travel stipend and reimbursement of expenses of approximately $1,500.

The SETI Forward award is endowed to support undergraduate student research activities. Each summer, dozens of undergraduates complete internships alongside SETI and astrobiology research scientists. SETI Forward seeks to bridge the gap between these internships and career opportunities in SETI science and astrobiology research.