Neil deGrasse Tyson

Neil deGrasse Tyson ( or ; born October 5, 1958) 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'' (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". Provided by Wikipedia