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.