Neil deGrasse Tyson is an American astrophysicist, planetary scientist, author, and science communicator. Since 1996, he has been the Frederick P. Rose Director of the Hayden Planetarium at the Rose Center for Earth and Space in New York City. In 2014, he hosted the television series Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey, a successor to Carl Sagan’s 1980 series Cosmos. 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’’
About Neil deGrasse Tyson in brief
Neil deGrasse Tyson is an American astrophysicist, planetary scientist, author, and science communicator. Since 1996, he has been the Frederick P. Rose Director of the Hayden Planetarium at the Rose Center for Earth and Space in New York City. Since 2009, Tyson has hosted the weekly podcast StarTalk. In 2014, he hosted the television series Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey, a successor to Carl Sagan’s 1980 series Cosmos. 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. 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’’. He is the author of two books: Merlin’s Tour of the Universe and Just Visiting This Planet. Tyson has two siblings: Stephen Joseph Tyson and Lynn Antipas Tyson. His mother, Sunchita Maria Tyson, was a gerontologist for the United States Department of Health, Education and Welfare, and is of Puerto Rican descent. His father, Cyril de Grasse Tyson, was a sociologist, human resource commissioner for New York. City mayor John Lindsay, and the first Director of Harlem Youth Opportunities Unlimited. Tyson’s middle name, deGrasse, is from the maiden name of his paternal grandmother, who was born as Altima de Grasse in the British West Indies island of Nevis.
He attended public schools in the Bronx: P.S 36, P. S 81, the Riverdale Kingsbridge Academy, and The Bronx High School of Science where he was captain of the wrestling team and editor-in-chief of the Physical Science Journal. Tyson obsessively studied astronomy in his teen years, and eventually even gained some fame in the astronomy community by giving some lectures on the subject at the age of fifteen. In his book, The Sky Is Not the Limit, Tyson wrote: My letter of application had been dripping with an interest in the universe. Within weeks, I received a personal letter from Carl Sagan, who had offered to put him up for a day in Ithaca, Mexico, if I did not come back to the Bronx to spend the night with him. Tyson said he knew he wanted to become a scientist when he found out he was 17-year-old Carl Sagan had invited him to a bus stop the day he was invited to spend a day with him in 1975. He credits Dr. Mark Chartrand III, director of the planetarium, as his first intellectual role model. Tyson credited Dr. Mark ChartRand III as his enthusiastic teaching style mixed with humor inspired Tyson to communicate the universe to others the way he did. Tyson wrote a monthly column in StarDate magazine, answering questions about the universe under the pen name ‘Merlin’
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