Dan Werthimer. View of Dan Werthimer, American astronomer and director of the SERENDIP (Search for Extraterrestrial Radio Emissions from Nearby Developed Intelligent Populations) project. He is based at the Space Sciences Laboratory, University of California, USA. SERENDIP's aim is to gather radio signals from radio telescope's and discover if the signals originate from alien civilisations. Werthimer devised the SETI (Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence) at home screen saver. This project encourages people to use their personal computers to process SERENDIP's data using a screen saver. The data is transferred to and from SERENDIP via the internet.