Frank Drake has been searching for signals from extraterrestrial intelligent life since 1960, when he conducted the first such modern search at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Green Bank, West Virginia. He uses both radio and optical telescopes in these searches.
He has been a Professor of Astronomy at Cornell University and The University of California, Santa Cruz. He has been the President of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, the Board of Directors of the SETI Institute, the Board on Physics and Astronomy of the National Research Council, and the Dean of Natural Sciences at UCSC. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences. He has been the Director of the National Astronomy and Ionosphere Center, which operates the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico.
He has developed a key equation that guides SETI research and developed the basic concepts used in the design of many new forms radio telescopes. He developed the concepts that guided the transformation of the Arecibo radio telescope into one very useful in astronomy. He devised methods for constructing understandable messages to be sent by radio or optical means to other civilizations in space, and the radio message sent from Arecibo in 1974 to the Hercules star cluster. He was part of the groups that produced the Pioneer message plaques on the Pioneer 10 and 11 spacecraft, and the Voyager Golden Record on the Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft.
