1. Douglas A Vakoch is an American astrobiologist, search for extraterrestrial intelligence researcher, psychologist, and president of METI International, a nonprofit research and educational organization devoted to transmitting intentional signals to extraterrestrial civilizations.
Douglas Vakoch completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Vanderbilt University before he accepted a position at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California.
In 2010, Douglas Vakoch was one of the leaders of Project Dorothy, a multinational effort launched by Japanese astronomer Shin-ya Narusawa to observe several stars for signals from other civilizations to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of Project Ozma, the first modern-day search for extraterrestrial intelligence.
In contrast to the images included on the Voyager Golden Record that emphasized the positive aspects of life on Earth, Douglas Vakoch proposes that we should be honest about human frailties.
Douglas Vakoch suggests that the most informative things that humankind can convey to an advanced civilization are the struggles humankind is going through as an adolescent technological civilization.
Douglas Vakoch argues that if we contact other civilizations, they will likely be thousands or millions of years older than humanity's civilization, meaning the extraterrestrial civilization would have greater stability.
Douglas Vakoch calls for increasing the range of people participating in interstellar message design, and he led a workshop in Paris in 2002 on the interface of art and science in interstellar messages.
Douglas Vakoch led meetings attended by anthropologists and sociologists, and he advocates interstellar messages that capture the diversity of human cultures.
Douglas Vakoch has contributed to the study of space exploration, most notably through books examining psychological dimensions of space travel.
At the 2008 annual convention of the American Psychological Association, Douglas Vakoch chaired the symposium "To the Moon and Mars: Psychology of Long-Duration Space Exploration," which was identified as a "highlight" of the convention.
Douglas Vakoch has collaborated on several empirical studies of human cognition.
Douglas Vakoch has appeared frequently on television networks including the Discovery Channel, BBC, PBS, and History Channel.