Meet Shelley Wright, UC San Diego Astrophysicist

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This article originally appeared in the fall 2024 issue of UC San Diego Magazine as “Look to the Stars.”

Professor Shelley Wright, a leading astrophysicist at UC San Diego, has spent her decades-long  career building telescopes and astronomical instruments that pierce the veil of space, enabling the study of supermassive black holes, distant galaxies and even the search for other life. 

She’s a founding member of the Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics, established in March 2023, which brings together observational, experimental and theoretical astrophysics. 

1. What kind of research do you specialize in? 

I’m an experimental astrophysicist, and I build instruments such as cameras, spectrographics and telescopes to observe the universe in unique ways. One topic I’ve studied throughout my career is SETI: the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. In particular, I’ve built new devices that operate at unique wavelengths to search for what we call “technosignatures.” These are any signs of technology used in interstellar communication.

2. Tell us about the new University of California PANOSETI telescopes at the Lick Observatory outside of San Jose, California.

Previous studies of optical and radio wavelengths typically look for signals from one star at a time. There are hundreds of billions of stars in our galaxy and likely hundreds of millions of habitable worlds. And we were interested in trying to design a new telescope system that would be able to look at large areas of the sky. Panoramic SETI, or PANOSETI, is designed to detect visible light that could be interstellar communication. There’s no other telescope system like it: PANOSETI is capable of taking pictures of the night sky at an extremely fast cadence — a nanosecond, which is one-billionth of a second. 

3. How are students involved in your research? 

Conducting SETI research is uncommon, and there are only a couple of universities that do it worldwide. We have three PANOSETI telescopes already deployed at the Lick Observatory, and we have UC San Diego undergraduates and graduates observing remotely, which is a unique opportunity only offered by the University of California. We also have undergraduate and graduate students in our Optical Infrared Laboratory who have been part of the fabrication, testing, commissioning and deployment of instruments. 

4. What can we learn about our universe from your observations and research?

Programs like SETI and our PANOSETI experiment are critically important. They engage our fascination about the universe and really delve into many of the leading questions in life: What is the universe? Why are we here? Are there possibly cosmic friends nearby? The pursuit of answering these questions has huge implications on humanity and our cosmic perspective. So engaging in SETI research, teaching about it and getting students involved is one of the most exciting things about engaging people in science.

5. Do you think we will find something that looks like a sign of extraterrestrial life? 

I think we’ll find a biosignature of a simple life-form sometime in our lifetime, but maybe not a technosignature. But it would be fantastic if we found a more intelligent companion to chat with, too!

To me, the importance of SETI is in the creativity it fosters in our research and technology development. Because what I have found over the years is that thinking about how to detect the universe in unique ways has allowed for better engineering, research developments and opportunities to explore space and astrophysical phenomena.