Sallie Baliunas, Ph.D. served as part Deputy Director of Mount Wilson Observatory and as Senior Scientist at the George C. Marshall Institute in Washington, DC, and chairs the Institute's Science Advisory Board and is past contributing editor to the World Climate Report. Her awards include the Newton-Lacy-Pierce Prize of the American Astronomical Society, the Petr Beckmann Award for Scientific Freedom and the Bok Prize from Harvard University. She has written over 200 scientific research articles. In 1991 Discover magazine profiled her as one of America's outstanding women scientists. She was technical consultant for a science-fiction television series, "Gene Roddenberry's Earth: Final Conflict," airing 1997 – 2001. She received her M.A. (1975) and Ph.D. (1980) degrees in Astrophysics from Harvard University.
Her research interests include solar variability and other factors in climate change, magnetohydrodynamics of the sun and sunlike stars, exoplanets and the use of laser electro-optics for the correction of turbulence due to the earth's atmosphere in astronomical images.