Neil deGrasse Tyson
Neil deGrasse Tyson is an American astrophysicist, author, and science communicator. 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. Since 1996, he has been the 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.
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 and Astrophysics for People in a Hurry. 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 and Just Visiting This Planet. 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".
Early life and education
Tyson was born in Manhattan as the second of three children, into a Catholic family living in the Bronx. His African-American father, Cyril deGrasse Tyson, was a sociologist and human resource commissioner for New York City mayor John Lindsay, and the first director of Harlem Youth Opportunities Unlimited. His mother, Sunchita Maria Tyson, was a gerontologist for the U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare and is of Puerto Rican descent. Neil has two siblings: Stephen Joseph Tyson and Lynn Antipas Tyson. Neil's middle name, deGrasse, is from the maiden name of his paternal grandmother, who was born as Altima de Grasse in the British West Indies island of Nevis.Tyson grew up in the Castle Hill neighborhood of the Bronx and then in Riverdale. From kindergarten throughout high school, Tyson attended public schools in the Bronx: PS 36 Unionport, PS 81 Robert J. Christen, the Riverdale Kingsbridge Academy, and graduated from The Bronx High School of Science in 1976 where he was captain of the wrestling team and editor-in-chief of the Physical Science Journal. His interest in astronomy began at the age of nine after visiting the sky theater of the Hayden Planetarium. He recalled that "so strong was that imprint that I'm certain that I had no choice in the matter, that in fact, the universe called me." During high school, Tyson attended astronomy courses offered by the Hayden Planetarium, which he called "the most formative period" of his life. He credited Mark Chartrand III, director of the planetarium at the time, as his "first intellectual role model" and his enthusiastic teaching style mixed with humor inspired Tyson to communicate the universe to others the way he did.
When he was 14, he received a scholarship from the Explorers Club of New York to view the June 1973 total solar eclipse aboard the SS Canberra. The scientific cruise carried two thousand scientists, engineers, and enthusiasts, including Neil Armstrong, Scott Carpenter, and Isaac Asimov.
Tyson obsessively studied astronomy in his teen years; he eventually even gained some fame in the astronomy community by giving lectures on the subject at the age of 15. Astronomer Carl Sagan, who was a faculty member at Cornell University, sought to recruit Tyson to Cornell for undergraduate studies. In his book, The Sky Is Not the Limit, Tyson wrote:
Tyson revisited this moment on his first episode of Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey. Pulling out a 1975 calendar belonging to the famous astronomer, he found the day Sagan invited the 17-year-old to spend a day in Ithaca. Sagan had offered to put him up for the night if his bus back to the Bronx did not come. Tyson said, "I already knew I wanted to become a scientist. But that afternoon, I learned from Carl the kind of person I wanted to become."
Tyson chose to attend Harvard where he majored in physics and lived in Currier House. He was a member of the rowing team during his freshman year, but returned to wrestling, lettering in his senior year. He was also active in dance.
File:Tyson - Apollo 40th anniversary 2009.jpg|thumb|left|upright|Tyson hosting the 40th anniversary celebration of Apollo 11 at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, July 2009
Tyson earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in physics at Harvard College in 1980 and then began his graduate work at the University of Texas at Austin, from which he received a Master of Arts degree in astronomy in 1983. By his own account, he did not spend as much time in the research lab as he should have. His professors encouraged him to consider alternative careers and the committee for his doctoral dissertation was dissolved, ending his pursuit of a doctorate from the University of Texas.
Tyson was a lecturer in astronomy at the University of Maryland from 1986 to 1987 and in 1988, he was accepted into the astronomy graduate program at Columbia University, where he earned a Master of Philosophy degree in astrophysics in 1989, and a PhD degree in astrophysics in 1991 under the supervision of Professor R. Michael Rich. Rich obtained funding to support Tyson's doctoral research from NASA and the ARCS Foundation, enabling Tyson to attend international meetings in Italy, Switzerland, Chile, and South Africa and to hire students to help him with data reduction. In the course of his thesis work, he observed using the 0.91 m telescope at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile, where he obtained images for the Calán/Tololo Supernova Survey helping to further their work in establishing Type Ia supernovae as standard candles.
During his thesis research at Columbia University, Tyson became acquainted with Professor David Spergel at Princeton University, who visited Columbia University in the course of collaborating with his thesis advisor on the Galactic bulge typically found in spiral galaxies.
Career
Tyson's research has focused on observations in cosmology, stellar evolution, galactic astronomy, bulges, and stellar formation. He has held numerous positions at institutions including the University of Maryland, Princeton University, the American Museum of Natural History, and the Hayden Planetarium.In 1994, Tyson joined the Hayden Planetarium as a staff scientist while he was a research affiliate in Princeton University. He became acting director of the planetarium in June 1995 and was appointed director in 1996. As director, he oversaw the planetarium's $210 million reconstruction project, which was completed in 2000. Upon being asked for his thoughts on becoming director, Tyson said "when I was a kid... there were scientists and educators on the staff at the Hayden Planetarium... who invested their time and energy in my enlightenment... and I've never forgotten that... to end up back there as its director, I feel this deep sense of duty, that I serve in the same capacity for people who come through the facility today, that others served for me".
Tyson has written a number of popular books on astrophysics. In 1995, he began to write the "Universe" column for Natural History magazine. In a column Tyson wrote for a special edition of the magazine, called "City of Stars", in 2002, he popularized the term "Manhattanhenge" to describe the two days annually on which the evening sun aligns with the street grid in Manhattan, making the sunset visible along unobstructed side streets. He had coined the term in 1996, inspired by how the phenomenon recalls the sun's solstice alignment with the Stonehenge monument in England. Tyson's column also influenced his work as a professor with The Great Courses.
In 2001, U.S. President George W. Bush appointed Tyson to serve on the Commission on the Future of the United States Aerospace Industry and in 2004 to serve on the President's Commission on Implementation of United States Space Exploration Policy, the latter better known as the "Moon, Mars, and Beyond" commission. Soon afterward, he was awarded the NASA Distinguished Public Service Medal, the highest civilian honor bestowed by NASA.
In 2004, Tyson hosted the four-part Origins miniseries of the PBS Nova series and with Donald Goldsmith, co-authored the companion volume for this series, Origins: Fourteen Billion Years Of Cosmic Evolution. He again collaborated with Goldsmith as the narrator on the documentary 400 Years of the Telescope, which premiered on PBS in April 2009.
As director of the Hayden Planetarium, Tyson bucked traditional thinking in order to keep Pluto from being referred to as the ninth planet in exhibits at the center. He has explained that he wanted to look at commonalities between objects, grouping the terrestrial planets together, the gas giants together, and Pluto with like objects, and to get away from simply counting the planets. He has stated on The Colbert Report, The Daily Show, and BBC Horizon that the decision has resulted in large amounts of hate mail, much of it from children. In 2006, the International Astronomical Union confirmed this assessment by changing Pluto to the dwarf planet classification.
Tyson recounted the heated online debate on the Cambridge Conference Network, a "widely read, UK-based Internet chat group", following Benny Peiser's renewed call for reclassification of Pluto's status. Peiser's entry, in which he posted articles from the AP and The Boston Globe, spawned from The New York Timess article entitled "Pluto's Not a Planet? Only in New York".
Tyson has been vice-president, president, and chairman of the board of the Planetary Society. He was also the host of the PBS program Nova ScienceNow until 2011. He attended and was a speaker at the Beyond Belief: Science, Religion, Reason and Survival symposium in November 2006.
File:Dr Neil deGrasse Tyson in Sydney.JPG|thumb|Tyson promoting the Cosmos TV series in Australia for National Geographic, 2014
In May 2009, Tyson launched a one-hour radio talk show called StarTalk, which he co-hosted with comedian Lynne Koplitz. The show was syndicated on Sunday afternoons on KTLK AM in Los Angeles and WHFS in Washington DC. The show lasted for thirteen weeks, but was resurrected in December 2010 and then, co-hosted with comedians Chuck Nice and Leighann Lord instead of Koplitz. Guests range from colleagues in science to celebrities such as GZA, Wil Wheaton, Sarah Silverman, and Bill Maher. The show is available via the Internet through a live stream or in the form of a podcast.
In April 2011, Tyson was the keynote speaker at the 93rd International Convention of the Phi Theta Kappa International Honor Society of the Two-year School. He and James Randi delivered a lecture entitled Skepticism, which related directly with the convention's theme of The Democratization of Information: Power, Peril, and Promise.
In 2012, Tyson announced that he would appear in a YouTube series based on his radio show StarTalk. It was distributed on the Nerdist YouTube Channel for a while until StarTalk became its own dedicated YouTube channel. On February 28, 2014, Tyson was a celebrity guest at the White House Student Film Festival.
In 2014, Tyson helped revive Carl Sagan's Cosmos: A Personal Voyage television series, presenting Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey on both FOX and the National Geographic Channel. Thirteen episodes were aired in the first season, and Tyson has said that if a second season were produced, he would pass the role of host to someone else in the science world. On March 9, 2020, he returned with a follow-up season of Cosmos titled Cosmos: Possible Worlds.
On April 20, 2015, Tyson began hosting a late-night talk show entitled StarTalk on the National Geographic Channel, where he interviews pop culture celebrities and asks them about their life experiences with science. Around 2016, he was co-developing a sandbox video game with Whatnot Entertainment, Neil deGrasse Tyson Presents: Space Odyssey, which aimed to help provide players with a realistic simulation of developing a space-faring culture, incorporating educational materials about space and technology. The development was abandoned after April 2020.