Professor Albert A. Harrison

Albert A. Harrison, Ph.D. is Professor Emeritus, Department of Psychology, University of California, Davis.
 
Al earned his BA and MA in Psychology from the University of California, Santa Barbara, and his Ph.D. in Social Psychology from the University of Michigan. In 1967, he joined the faculty of the Department of Psychology at the University of California, Davis, and in 1979 he advanced to Professor of Psychology.
 
Now Professor Emeritus, he is the author or coauthor of approximately 100 papers in a wide range of journals, his books include Living Aloft: Human Requirements for Extended Spaceflight (with Mary Connors and Faren Akins, NASA, 1985), From Antarctica to Outer Space: Life in Isolation and Confinement (with Yvonne A. Clearwater and Christopher P. McKay, Springer-Verlag, 1991), After Contact: The Human Response to Extraterrestrial Life (Plenum, 1997) and Spacefaring: The Human Dimension (University of California Press, 2001). His most recent book, Starstruck: Cosmic Visions in Science Religion and Folklore describes how new scientific findings about our place in the universe are encouraging people to find new answers to old existential questions.
 
Al was a member of NASA’s Space Human Factors Engineering Science and Technology Working Group and is a member of the Permanent SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Committee of the International Academy of Astronautics. He is currently involved in planetary defense (protecting the Earth from asteroids and comets) and is currently chairing a subgroup of the Academy’s Space Architecture Study Group.
 
In December 2003, Al was PI of a NASA-sponsored conference on new directions in behavioral health, and has recently edited a special supplement on this topic for Aviation, Space & Environmental Medicine (June, 2005). He is former deputy US editor of Systems Research and Behavioral Science and a science advisor to Bigelow Aerospace.
 
Listen to Al discuss Starstruck: Cosmic Visions in Science, Religion, and Folklore, Astrosociology, and the social science role in space education as well as space development.