Neil deGrasse Tyson
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![]() Tyson in 2017, receiving the Stephen Hawking Science Medal
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Born | October 5, 1958 (age 61) Manhattan, New York City, U.S.
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Spouse(s) |
Alice Young (m. 1988)
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Children | 2 |
Education | Harvard University (AB) University of Texas at Austin (MA) Columbia University (MPhil, PhD) |
Awards | NASA Distinguished Public Service Medal (2004) Klopsteg Memorial Award (2007) Public Welfare Medal (2015) |
Scientific career | |
Fields | |
Institutions | University of Maryland, College Park Princeton University American Museum of Natural History |
Thesis | A study of the abundance distributions along the minor axis of the Galactic bulge (1991) |
Doctoral advisor | R. Michael Rich |
Influences | |
Signature | |
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Neil deGrasse Tyson (American English: /dəˈɡræs/, British English, Australian English, New Zealand English, Indian English: /dəˈɡrɑːs/ ; born October 5, 1958) is an American astrophysicist, cosmologist, planetary scientist, author, and science communicator.
Since 1996, he has been the Frederick P. Rose Director of the Hayden Planetarium at the Rose Center for Earth and Space in New York City. The center is part of the American Museum of Natural History, where Tyson founded the Department of Astrophysics in 1997 and has been a research associate in the department since 2003.
Tyson studied at Harvard University, the University of Texas at Austin, and Columbia University. From 1991 to 1994, he was a postdoctoral research associate at Princeton University. In 1994, he joined the Hayden Planetarium as a staff scientist and the Princeton faculty as a visiting research scientist and lecturer. In 1996, he became director of the planetarium and oversaw its $210 million reconstruction project, which was completed in 2000.
From 1995 to 2005, Tyson wrote monthly essays in the "Universe" column for Natural History magazine, some of which were later published in his books Death by Black Hole (2007) and Astrophysics for People in a Hurry (2017). During the same period, he wrote a monthly column in StarDate magazine, answering questions about the universe under the pen name "Merlin". Material from the column appeared in his books Merlin's Tour of the Universe (1998) and Just Visiting This Planet (1998). Tyson served on a 2001 government commission on the future of the U.S. aerospace industry and on the 2004 Moon, Mars and Beyond commission. He was awarded the NASA Distinguished Public Service Medal in the same year. From 2006 to 2011, he hosted the television show NOVA ScienceNow on PBS. Since 2009, Tyson has hosted the weekly podcast StarTalk. A spin-off, also called StarTalk, began airing on National Geographic in 2015. In 2014, he hosted the television series Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey, a successor to Carl Sagan's 1980 series Cosmos: A Personal Voyage. The U.S. National Academy of Sciences awarded Tyson the Public Welfare Medal in 2015 for his "extraordinary role in exciting the public about the wonders of science".
- My Favorite Universe
- Accessory to War – The Unspoken Alliance Between Astrophysics and the Military
- Space Chronicles: Facing the Ultimate Frontier
- Death by Black Hole
- Merlin's Tour of the Universe: A Skywatcher's Guide to Everything from Mars and Quasars to Comets, Planets, Blue Moons, and Werewolves
- The Sky is Not the Limit: Adventures of an Urban Astrophysicist
- Origins: Fourteen Billion Years of Cosmic Evolution
- Welcome to the Universe: An Astrophysical Tour