Is there life beyond our planet? It’s a question that third-year University of Toronto undergraduate student Peter Ma began thinking about when he was still in high school.
A math and physics student entering his fourth year in the Faculty of Arts & Science, Ma is dedicated to searching for aliens – and while that may sound like something out of science fiction, he isn’t exactly chasing down little green men. Instead, he’s drawing on his passion for science to find the data that could prove we’re not alone in the universe.
Ma was in Grade 12 when he wrote an algorithm to look for signs of intelligent life using open-source data from the University of California, Berkeley and its Breakthrough Listen research program.
After cold-emailing researchers at the SETI Institute, he became the youngest member of the team of international researchers at UC Berkeley dedicated to the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, and was lead author on a paper published earlier this year in the journal Nature Astronomy.
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