Douglas A. Vakoch (/ˈvɑːˌkoʊtʃ/ VAH-kohtch; born June 16, 1961) is an American astrobiologist, search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) researcher, psychologist, and president of METI International, a nonprofit research and educational organization devoted to transmitting intentional signals to extraterrestrial civilizations.

Douglas Vakoch grew up in rural Minnesota. He created his first interstellar message as a high school student—a series of two-dimensional pictures that built upon a message transmitted from Arecibo Observatory in 1974. "The issue that really hit me early on, and that has stayed with me, is just the challenge of creating a message that would be understandable," he told The New York Times Magazine. Vakoch earned a bachelor's degree in comparative religion from Carleton College, a master's degree in history and philosophy of science from the University of Notre Dame, and a PhD in psychology from Stony Brook University. He completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Vanderbilt University before he accepted a position at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California.

Vakoch argues that in order to make contact, humankind may need to take the initiative in transmitting, a project called active SETI. He has been called "a prominent voice in favor of active SETI," "the most prominent METI [messaging to extraterrestrial intelligence] proponent," and "the man who speaks for Earth." In Discover's ranking of scientists either in favor of or opposed to transmitting, Vakoch was cited as "super pro," at the extreme of those advocating messaging. After sixteen years at the SETI Institute, where he was director of Interstellar Message Composition, Vakoch founded METI (Messaging Extraterrestrial Intelligence), a nonprofit research and educational organization.

In 2010, Vakoch was one of the leaders of Project Dorothy, a multinational effort launched by Japanese astronomer Shin-ya Narusawa to observe several stars for signals from other civilizations to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of Project Ozma, the first modern-day search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI). Telling The Washington Post about the Project Dorothy observations, Vakoch said "[w]hat this weekend really does is begin the process of making it possible to track a possible SETI signal around the globe," and he added "[i]f a signal is detected, it has to be confirmed and followed, and now we're setting up a network to do that."

Vakoch contends that it is essential to expand an understanding of SETI beyond the technology needed to search by also re-examining assumptions about the nature of intelligence, which was the motivation for the METI workshop, “The Intelligence of SETI: Cognition and Communication in Extraterrestrial Intelligence,” held in San Juan, Puerto Rico on May 18, 2016. "By studying the variety of intelligence found on Earth," Vakoch said, "we can gain new insights into sending messages to life on other planets." Vakoch told the International Business Times that "[i]n this new approach, we're putting the intelligence back into SETI." He argues that the fact that extraterrestrial intelligence may rely on different senses than humans adds to the complexity of interspecies communication.

Vakoch "leads an international group of scientists, artists and scholars from the humanities, as they ponder how we could communicate what it’s like to be human across the vast distances of interstellar space." He advocates creating interstellar messages that begin with concepts shared by humans and extraterrestrials, such as basic mathematics and science and building on these shared concepts to express content that may be distinctly human. He argues that while mathematics and science provide the best starting point for interstellar messages, it is possible that extraterrestrial mathematics and science may vary significantly from human mathematics and science. He notes that on Earth both Euclidean and non-Euclidean geometries provide internally consistent frameworks for understanding the world, but they vary in their foundational assumptions.

In contrast to the images included on the Voyager Golden Record that emphasized the positive aspects of life on Earth, Vakoch proposes that we should be honest about human frailties. He suggests that the most informative things that humankind can convey to an advanced civilization are the struggles humankind is going through as an adolescent technological civilization. Vakoch argues that if we contact other civilizations, they will likely be thousands or millions of years older than humanity's civilization, meaning the extraterrestrial civilization would have greater stability. "If we wish to convey what it is about us that is distinctive, it may be our weakness, our fears, our unknowing – and yet a willingness to forge ahead to attempt contact in spite of this," Vakoch told The Psychologist.

Vakoch calls for increasing the range of people participating in interstellar message design, and he led a workshop in Paris in 2002 on the interface of art and science in interstellar messages. Speaking to Reuters on the day of the meeting, he said "Today the focus has been on whether we can explain something about our aesthetic sensibilities. Is there something about art that is either universal or that can be taught...?"