Neil deGrasse Tyson

Neil deGrasse Tyson (born 1958) is an American astrophysicist, author and science communicator. He studied at Harvard University, the University of Texas at Austin and Columbia University, and from 1991 to 1994 was a postdoctoral research associate at Princeton University. In 1994 he joined the Hayden Planetarium as a staff scientist, and since 1996 he has directed the planetarium at the Rose Center for Earth and Space in New York City, part of the American Museum of Natural History, where he founded the Department of Astrophysics in 1997. He wrote the Universe column for Natural History magazine from 1995 to 2005, hosted the PBS programme NOVA ScienceNow from 2006 to 2011, has hosted the StarTalk podcast since 2009 and presented the 2014 series Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey. The National Academy of Sciences gave him its Public Welfare Medal in 2015.