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CORVALLIS - Jill Tarter, director of the Phoenix Project at the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Institute in Mountain View, Calif., and the real-life model for Jodie Foster's character in the movie Contact, will speak at Oregon State University on Tuesday, Jan. 15.

Tarter's lecture, "The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence," will begin at 7:30 p.m. and will be held in the Austin Auditorium at LaSells Stewart Center on the OSU campus. It is sponsored by the OSU Alumni Association and the OSU Research Office.

As a principal investigator for the non-profit SETI Institute, Tarter served as project scientist for NASA's High Resolution Microwave Survey (HRMS), until its termination by Congress in 1993. She had the opportunity to meld together old and new engineering skills with a knowledge of the observable universe, in order to conduct and plan for thorough observations of the sky through a set of narrow band pulse sensitive filters never before systematically employed by astronomers.

Today, Tarter serves as the director for Project Phoenix, the SETI Institute's privately funded continuation of the targeted search portion of HRMS.

The lecture is free and open to the public. For more information, contact Scott Elmshaeuser at 541-737-8883.