REU Site: Berkeley SETI Research Center

This is a renewal of a 10-week summer REU (Research Experiences for Undergraduates) Site serving 8 student interns per year. This site is hosted by the University of California Berkeley Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) Research Center (BSRC). The renewal of this successful NSF REU Site will provide transformative research experiences and long-term mentorship to support students’ growth as scientists, technologists, and leaders. The Breakthrough Listen initiative at BSRC offers an unparalleled opportunity for students to contribute to big-data, big-question science. The SETI field is small but growing, and BSRC is recognized as a world leader. Breakthrough Listen generates massive datasets, providing students with real-world opportunities to develop open-source tools, data pipelines, visualizations, and documentation that are actively used by the scientific community. The fundamental question we explore: Are we alone in the Universe? - drives advances in instrumentation, algorithm development, and data infrastructure that benefit both SETI and astronomy more broadly. Undergraduate students will work with BSRC researchers to develop scientific approaches to constrain the prevalence of technosignatures from surveys that generate petabytes of data; design new instruments and digital backends for radio telescopes; write algorithms to quantify radio frequency interference and to identify good candidate signals, including with machine learning (ML) approaches and citizen science, and work on making data useful and accessible to the astronomical community and to the general public. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria. NSF Award ID: 2547394 | Program: 01002627DB NSF RESEARCH & RELATED ACTIVIT | Principal Investigator: Stephen Croft | Institution: University of California-Berkeley, BERKELEY, CA | Award Amount: $374,521 View on NSF Award Search: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/show-award/?AWD_ID=2547394 View on Research.gov: https://www.research.gov/awardapi-service/v1/awards/2547394.html