J. Anthony Tyson


John Anthony Tyson is an American physicist and astronomer, professor of University of California, Davis, and chief scientist of the Vera C. Rubin Observatory. He pioneered the technique of weak gravitational lensing.
WWW tyson.ucdavis.edu

Education

Tyson received in 1962 his bachelor's degree from Stanford University and in 1967 his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin.

Career

He was a postdoc from 1967 to 1969 at the University of Chicago. He was then a member of the technical staff at AT&T Bell Laboratories from 1969 to 1985. In 1985 he became a distinguished member of the technical staff at Bell Laboratories until 2004. Since 2004 he has been a professor at the University of California, Davis.
In the late 1970s he applied CCDs to astronomy, discovering the faint blue galaxies. Using these distant galaxies he made the first maps of dark matter using weak gravitational lensing. Tyson built the Big Throughput Camera, which was used to discover dark energy. In the 1990s he started a project to build a next generation sky survey, and directed the project for 15 years. He is now the chief scientist for the Vera C. Rubin Observatory.
His research interests are cosmology, dark matter, dark energy, observational optical astronomy, experimental gravitational physics, and new instruments.

Honors and awards