The Search for Living Worlds Beyond the Solar System

media release: Join the Wisconsin Center for Origins Research (WiCOR) for the Spring 2026 WiCOR Lecture from Dr. Victoria Meadows (Senior Research Scientist, SETI Institute). Dr. Meadows will present “The Search for Living Worlds Beyond the Solar System” on Wednesday, April 22, 2026, at 7:00 pm in The Marquee at Union South. This event is open to the public. Visit go.wisc.edu/wicor-lecture-sp2026 for more information.

WiCOR is committed to creating an inclusive and accessible event. If you need a reasonable accommodation, please contact Vanessa Orr, WiCOR Administrative Manager, at wicor@wisc.edu. All requests must be made by April 8. We will attempt to implement late requests but cannot guarantee they will be met.

Abstract:

One of the grandest and most enduring questions in human history has been whether we are alone in the Universe. While previous generations could only speculate about the possibility of life around other stars, in the next two decades NASA will develop and deploy the telescopes needed to begin exploring the environments of distant worlds. But getting these challenging observations alone is not enough – we also need an improved understanding of what we should be looking for, and how we might interpret what we see. In this talk Dr. Meadows will highlight work being done by her NASA Virtual Planetary Laboratory team to guide this search – including understanding the factors that lead to a planet being able to support life, and how we might recognize and assess signs of alien life on a distant world. She will also provide an overview of current and upcoming NASA space telescopes, and discuss their potential for exploring living worlds beyond our Solar System.

Speaker Bio:

VICTORIA S. MEADOWS

Principal Investigator/Senior Research Scientist

Dr. Victoria Meadows is a Senior Research Scientist at the SETI Institute.  She leads the massively interdisciplinary NASA Virtual Planetary Laboratory (VPL@SETI), which she started in 2001 with the goal of developing a scientific foundation for the search for habitability and life beyond the Solar System. Her research includes studying the present and past Earth as analogs for exoplanet environments, theoretical modeling of star-planet interactions, and using simulated spectra of exoplanets to understand how to best detect signs of life in a planetary environment. Dr. Meadows has served on numerous NASA mission concept development teams, including the Large UV Optical Infrared Telescope, and is currently a member of the  NASA Habitable Worlds Observatory Community Science and Instrumentation Team.  She was the Chair for the Exoplanets, Astrobiology and the Solar System Science Panel for the National Academy of Sciences Astro2020 Decadal Report. She is a SETI Institute Drake Award Recipient, a Fellow of both the American Geophysical Union and the American Astronomical Society, and Professor Emeritus at the University of Washington.  She obtained her PhD from the University of Sydney.