🇺🇸Neil deGrasse
Tyson

He was nine years old when the Hayden Planetarium in Manhattan changed everything. Neil deGrasse Tyson had grown up in the Bronx in a family that nurtured curiosity — his father was a sociologist, his mother a gerontologist — and the city's concrete grid had not dulled his appetite for the natural world. But the night he first looked up at the projected star field on the planetarium's domed ceiling, something locked into place. He later said that the sky he saw projected above him looked so staggeringly beautiful that he initially assumed it must be fake, a Hollywood exaggeration. When he realized it was real — that the actual sky above the city's light pollution contained those same stars in those same arrangements — the thought was almost too large to hold. He has spent the decades since trying to give that feeling to everyone else.

Neil deGrasse Tyson was born on October 5, 1958, in Manhattan, the second of three children of Cyril deGrasse Tyson and Sunchita Maria Feliciano. The family moved to the Riverdale neighborhood of the Bronx when he was a child, and he attended the Bronx High School of Science — one of New York City's elite specialized public schools — where he was captain of the wrestling team and editor of the physical science journal. At seventeen, he wrote to Carl Sagan at Cornell University, asking about graduate study. Sagan wrote back, invited him to campus, met him personally, showed him the laboratory, and gave him a copy of one of his books — an act of generosity toward an unknown teenager that Tyson has described repeatedly as defining, both in the way it opened his sense of what was possible and in the model it provided for how an established scientist should treat the next generation.

He enrolled at Harvard, where he received his bachelor's degree in physics in 1980. He received his master's from the University of Texas at Austin in 1983 and his doctorate in astrophysics from Columbia University in 1991. His research at Columbia focused on the structure of the Milky Way's bulge and galactic star formation, and he joined the Hayden Planetarium as a staff scientist in 1994. In 1996, at thirty-seven, he was named the Frederick P. Rose Director of the Hayden Planetarium — the institution that had first electrified him thirty years earlier — a position he has held ever since.

His transition from research scientist to science communicator was gradual and then, with the growth of digital media, overwhelming. He began writing popular books — Merlin's Tour of the Universe (1989), The Sky Is Not the Limit (2000), Astrophysics for People in a Hurry (2017) — and appearing on television. His 2004 involvement with the International Astronomical Union's recategorization of Pluto as a dwarf planet generated a public controversy that somehow made him more famous rather than less. In 2006 he began hosting NOVA ScienceNow on PBS. In 2009 he launched StarTalk, a podcast and later a National Geographic television series, combining astrophysics with popular culture in a format aimed at reaching audiences that would never watch a traditional science documentary. The podcast eventually became one of the most downloaded science programs in the world.

In 2014 he hosted Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey, the sequel to Carl Sagan's 1980 series, produced by Seth MacFarlane and Ann Druyan. The new series, broadcast on Fox and National Geographic Channel, updated the original's tour of the universe with twenty-first-century cosmology and computer-generated imagery while explicitly honoring Sagan's legacy — opening, in its first episode, with Tyson standing at the same coastal rock formation in California where Sagan had stood in 1980. The series was watched by hundreds of millions of people worldwide and won four Emmy Awards. He has received NASA's Distinguished Public Service Medal twice and holds more than twenty honorary doctorates. He remains one of the most recognized scientists in the world, appearing regularly in television, film, and social media, and consistently polling as the most trusted voice in public science communication in the United States.