Neil deGrasse Tyson

Neil deGrasse Tyson is an American astrophysicist, author, and science communicator. He studied at Harvard University, the University of Texas at Austin, and Columbia University. Tyson worked as a postdoctoral research associate at Princeton University from 1991 to 1994. In 1994, he joined the Hayden Planetarium as a staff scientist and the Princeton faculty as a visiting research scientist and lecturer. Tyson became the director of the planetarium in 1996 and oversaw its $210 million reconstruction project, completed in 2000. He has been the director of the Hayden Planetarium at the Rose Center for Earth and Space in New York City since 1996. Tyson founded the Department of Astrophysics at the American Museum of Natural History in 1997 and has been a research associate in the department since 2003.