- Born
- Birth nameNeil de Grasse Tyson
- Height6′ 2″ (1.88 m)
- Neil deGrasse Tyson is an American astrophysicist, cosmologist, author, and science communicator.
Born and raised in New York City, Tyson became interested in astronomy at the age of nine after a visit to the Hayden Planetarium. After graduating from the Bronx High School of Science, where he was editor-in-chief of the Physical Science Journal, he completed a bachelor's degree in physics at Harvard University in 1980. After receiving a master's degree in astronomy at the University of Texas at Austin in 1983, he earned his master's (1989) and doctorate (1991) in astrophysics at Columbia University. For the next three years, 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 published in his book Death by Black Hole (2007). During the same period, he wrote a monthly column in Star Date 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.
In 2014, he hosted the television series Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey, a successor to Carl Sagan's 1980 series Cosmos: A Personal Voyage.
As a science communicator, Tyson regularly appears on television, radio, and various other media outlets.
- IMDb mini biography by: Pedro Borges
- SpouseAlice Young(1988 - present) (2 children)
- Children
- ParentsCyril deGrasse TysonLynn Antipas Tyson
- RelativesStephen Joseph Tyson(Sibling)Lynn Antipas Tyson(Sibling)Monique Fortune(Cousin)
- Deep baritone voice
- At his high school's 20-year reunion in 1996, Tyson was voted the graduate with the "coolest job."
- First African American director of the American Museum of Natural History's Hayden Planetarium, in New York City. Tyson is also a researcher, a professor of astrophysics at Princeton University, and a general-interest science columnist. Author of books for nonspecialists on space and the universe (listed under Other Works).
- Received his Bachelor's degree from Harvard, his Master's from the University of Texas, and his PhD from Columbia University.
- Has two children: Travis Tyson, and Miranda Tyson.
- All-time favorite Broadway musical is Andrew Lloyd Webber & Tim Rice's "Jesus Christ Superstar".
- The more your ideas are untestable, either in principle or in practice, the less useful they are to the advance of science.
- Recognize that the very molecules that make up your body, the atoms that construct the molecules, are traceable to the crucibles that were once the centers of high mass stars that exploded their chemically rich guts into the galaxy, enriching pristine gas clouds with the chemistry of life. So that we are all connected to each other biologically, to the earth chemically and to the rest of the universe atomically. That's kinda cool! That makes me smile and I actually feel quite large at the end of that. It's not that we are better than the universe, we are part of the universe. We are in the universe and the universe is in us.
- The good thing about science is that it's true whether or not you believe in it.
- Where ignorance lurks, so too do the frontiers of discovery and imagination.
- Science is something to be proud of, it allows us to understand the world in spite of ourselves.
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