Neil deGrasse Tyson

Neil deGrasse Tyson, born October 5, 1958, in Manhattan, grew up in the Bronx as the second of three children in a Catholic household. His father, Cyril deGrasse Tyson, was a sociologist and human resource commissioner for New York City mayor John Lindsay, while his mother, Sunchita Maria Tyson, worked as a gerontologist for the U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare and was of Puerto Rican descent. His middle name, deGrasse, comes from his paternal grandmother’s maiden name, Altima de Grasse, who was born on the island of Nevis in the British West Indies.

Tyson attended public schools in the Bronx from kindergarten through high school, graduating from The Bronx High School of Science in 1976, where he captained the wrestling team and edited the Physical Science Journal. His passion for astronomy ignited at age nine after a visit to the Hayden Planetarium’s sky theater. He later took astronomy courses there during high school, calling that period the most formative of his life, and credited planetarium director Mark Chartrand III as his first intellectual role model. At 14, he won a scholarship from the Explorers Club of New York to view the June 1973 total solar eclipse aboard the SS Canberra, a cruise carrying two thousand scientists and enthusiasts, including Neil Armstrong, Scott Carpenter, and Isaac Asimov. By age 15, he was giving astronomy lectures and had gained some recognition in the field. Astronomer Carl Sagan tried to recruit him to Cornell for undergraduate studies, and at 17, Tyson spent a day with Sagan in Ithaca, an experience he later described as shaping the kind of person he wanted to become.

Tyson chose Harvard, majoring in physics and living in Currier House. He wrestled and earned varsity rank in his senior year, and also danced in styles including jazz, ballet, Afro-Caribbean, and Latin ballroom. He earned a Bachelor of Arts in physics from Harvard in 1980, then a Master of Arts in astronomy from the University of Texas at Austin in 1983. His doctoral work at Texas stalled when his dissertation committee dissolved, and professors suggested he consider other careers. He later became a lecturer in astronomy at the University of Maryland.

From 1991 to 1994, Tyson was a postdoctoral research associate at Princeton University. In 1994, he joined the Hayden Planetarium as a staff scientist and also became a visiting research scientist and lecturer at Princeton. He became the planetarium’s director in 1996, overseeing its $210 million reconstruction, completed in 2000. Since then, he has directed the Hayden Planetarium at the Rose Center for Earth and Space, part of the American Museum of Natural History. He founded the museum’s Department of Astrophysics in 1997 and has been a research associate there since 2003.

Between 1995 and 2005, Tyson wrote monthly essays for *Natural History* magazine’s “Universe” column, later collected in books like *Death by Black Hole* (2007) and *Astrophysics for People in a Hurry* (2017). During the same period, he answered readers’ questions under the pen name “Merlin” for a monthly column in *StarDate* magazine, material that appeared in *Merlin’s Tour of the Universe* (1989) and *Just Visiting This Planet* (1998). He served on a 2001 government commission on the future of the U.S. aerospace industry and on the 2004 Moon, Mars and Beyond commission, receiving the NASA Distinguished Public Service Medal that same year. From 2006 to 2011, he hosted the PBS show *NOVA ScienceNow*. Since 2009, he has hosted the weekly podcast *StarTalk*, which spun off into a National Geographic television series in 2015. In 2014, he hosted *Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey*, a successor to Carl Sagan’s 1980 series. The U.S. National Academy of Sciences awarded him the Public Welfare Medal in 2015 for his role in exciting the public about science.