Ray Villard

Ray Villard has dedicated his career to making astronomy accessible to the public. As News Director for the Space Telescope Science Institute at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, he is responsible for sharing the latest discoveries made with the Hubble Space Telescope.

In 2004, Villard published Infinite Worlds, an illustrated book about the discovery of extrasolar planets, which was later adapted into a National Geographic Channel documentary titled Alien Earths. The documentary went on to be nominated for a Prime Time Emmy Award in 2010.

Villard has received several NASA service awards for his contributions to the Hubble project. He holds a Master’s degree in Science Communication from Boston University.

Presentations at Shore Leave 45 (2025):

Celebrating The 10 Year Anniversary of the New Horizons Pluto Flyby.
The year 2015 bookended America’s reconnaissance of all the know planets in our solar system.
The tale would have been a little more boring if Pluto was not included in this golden age of
exploration. Despite cancellation and other cutbacks, NASA’s New Horizons probe catapulted
into space just months before the IAU took the misguided step to declassify Pluto as a planet.
This talk will review the triumph of a reaching the “little planet that could.” 

Genesis II – When Will We Have Concrete Evidence of Life Space?
Our restless universe is all about the miraculous dynamism of existence. Therefore, finding life
beyond Earth is a matter of when not if. But when will we ultimately have concrete evidence that the scientific community can agree on? The first step will likely be uncovering microbes on
planets and moons in our solar system. Identifying inhabitable planets around other stars will
take decades of research with telescopes having the optical precision needed for identifying
biomarkers. If the SETI program eventually finds an artificial radio or optical transmission, we
will immediately know that intelligent life is a condition of the universe.