Neil deGrasse Tyson (born October 5, 1958) is an American astrophysicist, cosmologist, 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. 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.
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.
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".
Tyson grew up in the Castle Hill neighborhood of the Bronx, and later in Riverdale. From kindergarten throughout high school, Tyson attended public schools in the Bronx: P.S. 36, P.S. 81, the Riverdale Kingsbridge Academy (then called "P.S. 141"), and The Bronx High School of Science (1972–1976) where he was captain of the wrestling team and editor-in-chief of the Physical Science Journal. His interest in astronomy began at the age of nine after visiting the sky theater of the Hayden Planetarium. He recalled that "so strong was that imprint [of the night sky] that I'm certain that I had no choice in the matter, that in fact, the universe called me." During high school, Tyson attended astronomy courses offered by the Hayden Planetarium, which he called "the most formative period" of his life. He credited Dr. Mark Chartrand III, director of the planetarium at the time, as his "first intellectual role model" and his enthusiastic teaching style mixed with humor inspired Tyson to communicate the universe to others the way he did.
Tyson obsessively studied astronomy in his teen years, and eventually even gained some fame in the astronomy community by giving lectures on the subject at the age of fifteen. Astronomer Carl Sagan, who was a faculty member at Cornell University, tried to recruit Tyson to Cornell for undergraduate studies. In his book, The Sky Is Not the Limit, Tyson wrote:
My letter of application had been dripping with an interest in the universe. The admission office, unbeknownst to me, had forwarded my application to Carl Sagan's attention. Within weeks, I received a personal letter...
Tyson revisited this moment on his first episode of Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey. Pulling out a 1975 calendar belonging to the famous astronomer, he found the day Sagan invited the 17-year-old to spend a day in Ithaca. Sagan had offered to put him up for the night if his bus back to the Bronx did not come. Tyson said, "I already knew I wanted to become a scientist. But that afternoon, I learned from Carl the kind of person I wanted to become.
Tyson chose to attend Harvard where he majored in physics and lived in Currier House. He was a member of the crew team during his freshman year, but returned to wrestling, lettering in his senior year. He was also active in dance, in styles including jazz, ballet, Afro-Caribbean, and Latin Ballroom.
Tyson earned an AB degree in physics at Harvard College in 1980 and then began his graduate work at the University of Texas at Austin, from which he received an MA degree in astronomy in 1983. By his own account, he did not spend as much time in the research lab as he should have. His professors encouraged him to consider alternative careers and the committee for his doctoral dissertation was dissolved, ending his pursuit of a doctorate from the University of Texas.
Tyson was a lecturer in astronomy at the University of Maryland from 1986 to 1987 and in 1988, he was accepted into the astronomy graduate program at Columbia University, where he earned an MPhil degree in astrophysics in 1989, and a PhD degree in astrophysics in 1991 under the supervision of Professor R. Michael Rich. Rich obtained funding to support Tyson's doctoral research from NASA and the ARCS foundation enabling Tyson to attend international meetings in Italy, Switzerland, Chile, and South Africa and to hire students to help him with data reduction. In the course of his thesis work, he observed using the 0.91 m telescope at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile, where he obtained images for the Calán/Tololo Supernova Survey helping to further their work in establishing Type Ia supernovae as standard candles. During his thesis research at Columbia University, Tyson became acquainted with Professor David Spergel at Princeton University, who visited Columbia University in the course of collaborating with his thesis advisor on the Galactic bulge typically found in spiral galaxies.
In 1994, Tyson joined the Hayden Planetarium as a staff scientist while he was a research affiliate in Princeton University. He became acting director of the planetarium in June 1995 and was appointed director in 1996. As director, he oversaw the planetarium's $210 million reconstruction project, which was completed in 2000. Upon being asked for his thoughts on becoming director, Tyson said "when I was a kid... there were scientists and educators on the staff at the Hayden Planetarium... who invested their time and energy in my enlightenment... and I've never forgotten that. And to end up back there as its director, I feel this deep sense of duty, that I serve in the same capacity for people who come through the facility today, that others served for me".
Tyson has written a number of popular books on astronomy. In 1995, he began to write the "Universe" column for Natural History magazine. In a column he authored for a special edition of the magazine, called "City of Stars", in 2002, Tyson popularized the term "Manhattanhenge" to describe the two days annually on which the evening sun aligns with the street grid in Manhattan, making the sunset visible along unobstructed side streets. He had coined the term in 1996, inspired by how the phenomenon recalls the sun's solstice alignment with the Stonehenge monument in England. Tyson's column also influenced his work as a professor with The Great Courses.
In 2001, U.S. President George W. Bush appointed Tyson to serve on the Commission on the Future of the United States Aerospace Industry and in 2004 to serve on the President's Commission on Implementation of United States Space Exploration Policy, the latter better known as the "Moon, Mars, and Beyond" commission. Soon afterward, he was awarded the NASA Distinguished Public Service Medal, the highest civilian honor bestowed by NASA.
In 2004, Tyson hosted the four-part Origins miniseries of the PBS Nova series, and, with Donald Goldsmith, co-authored the companion volume for this series, Origins: Fourteen Billion Years Of Cosmic Evolution. He again collaborated with Goldsmith as the narrator on the documentary 400 Years of the Telescope, which premiered on PBS in April 2009.
As director of the Hayden Planetarium, Tyson bucked traditional thinking in order to keep Pluto from being referred to as the ninth planet in exhibits at the center. Tyson has explained that he wanted to look at commonalities between objects, grouping the terrestrial planets together, the gas giants together, and Pluto with like objects, and to get away from simply counting the planets. He has stated on The Colbert Report, The Daily Show, and BBC Horizon that this decision has resulted in large amounts of hate mail, much of it from children. In 2006, the International Astronomical Union (IAU) confirmed this assessment by changing Pluto to the dwarf planet classification. Tyson recounted the heated online debate on the Cambridge Conference Network (CCNet), a "widely read, UK-based Internet chat group", following Benny Peiser's renewed call for reclassification of Pluto's status. Peiser's entry, in which he posted articles from the AP and The Boston Globe, spawned from The New York Times's article entitled "Pluto's Not a Planet? Only in New York".
Tyson has been vice-president, president, and chairman of the board of the Planetary Society. He was also the host of the PBS program Nova ScienceNow until 2011. He attended and was a speaker at the Beyond Belief: Science, Religion, Reason and Survival symposium in November 2006. In 2007, Tyson was chosen to be a regular on The History Channel's popular series The Universe.
In May 2009, Tyson launched a one-hour radio talk show called StarTalk, which he co-hosted with comedian Lynne Koplitz. The show was syndicated on Sunday afternoons on KTLK AM in Los Angeles and WHFS in Washington DC. The show lasted for thirteen weeks, but was resurrected in December 2010 and then, co-hosted with comedians Chuck Nice and Leighann Lord instead of Koplitz. Guests range from colleagues in science to celebrities such as GZA, Wil Wheaton, Sarah Silverman, and Bill Maher. The show is available via the Internet through a live stream or in the form of a podcast.
In April 2011, Tyson was the keynote speaker at the 93rd International Convention of the Phi Theta Kappa International Honor Society of the Two-year School. He and James Randi delivered a lecture entitled Skepticism, which related directly with the convention's theme of The Democratization of Information: Power, Peril, and Promise.
In 2012, Tyson announced that he would appear in a YouTube series based on his radio show StarTalk. A premiere date for the show has not been announced, but it will be distributed on the Nerdist YouTube Channel. On February 28, 2014, Tyson was a celebrity guest at the White House Student Film Festival.
In 2014, Tyson helped revive Carl Sagan's Cosmos: A Personal Voyage television series, presenting Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey on both FOX and the National Geographic Channel. Thirteen episodes were aired in the first season, and Tyson has stated that if a second season were produced, he would pass the role of host to someone else in the science world. In early January, 2018, it was announced that a second season of Cosmos was in production, and that Tyson would once again act as host.
On April 20, 2015, Tyson began hosting a late-night talk show entitled StarTalk on the National Geographic Channel, where Tyson interviews pop culture celebrities and asks them about their life experiences with science.
Tyson is co-developing a sandbox video game with Whatnot Entertainment, Neil deGrasse Tyson Presents: Space Odyssey, which aims to help provide players with a realistic simulation of developing a space-faring culture, incorporating educational materials about space and technology. The game was anticipated for release in 2018.
When asked during a question session at the University at Buffalo if he believed in a higher power, Tyson responded: "Every account of a higher power that I've seen described, of all religions that I've seen, include many statements with regard to the benevolence of that power. When I look at the universe and all the ways the universe wants to kill us, I find it hard to reconcile that with statements of beneficence. In an interview with Big Think, Tyson said, "So, what people are really after is what is my stance on religion or spirituality or God, and I would say if I find a word that came closest, it would be 'agnostic' ... at the end of the day I'd rather not be any category at all." Additionally, in the same interview with Big Think, Tyson mentioned that he edited Wikipedia's entry on him to include the fact that he is an agnostic:
I'm constantly claimed by atheists. I find this intriguing. In fact, on my Wiki page – I didn't create the Wiki page, others did, and I'm flattered that people cared enough about my life to assemble it – and it said "Neil deGrasse Tyson is an atheist." I said, "Well that's not really true." I said, "Neil deGrasse Tyson is an agnostic." I went back a week later, it said "Neil deGrasse Tyson is an atheist" again – within a week! – and I said, "What's up with that?" and I said "Alright, I have to word it a little differently." So I said, okay "Neil deGrasse Tyson, widely claimed by atheists, is actually an agnostic."
During the interview "Called by the Universe: A Conversation with Neil deGrasse Tyson" in 2009, Tyson said: "I can't agree to the claims by atheists that I'm one of that community. I don't have the time, energy, interest of conducting myself that way... I'm not trying to convert people. I don't care.
In March 2014, philosopher and secularism proponent Massimo Pigliucci asked Tyson "What is it you think about God?" Tyson replied "I remain unconvinced by any claims anyone has ever made about the existence or the power of a divine force operating in the universe." Pigliucci then asked him why he expressed discomfort with the label "atheist" in his Big Think video. Tyson replied by reiterating his dislike for one-word labels, saying "That's what adjectives are for. What kind of atheist are you? Are you an ardent atheist? Are you a passive atheist? An apathetic atheist? Do you rally, or do you just not even care? So I'd be on the 'I really don't care' side of that, if you had to find adjectives to put in front of the word 'atheist'." Pigliucci contrasted Tyson with scientist Richard Dawkins: really does consider, at this point, himself to be an atheist activist. You very clearly made the point that you are not." Tyson replied: "I completely respect that activity. He's fulfilling a really important role out there.
Tyson has spoken about philosophy on numerous occasions. In March 2014, during an episode of The Nerdist Podcast, he stated that philosophy is "useless" and that a philosophy major "can really mess you up", which was met with disapproval. The philosopher Massimo Pigliucci later criticized him for "dismissing philosophy as a useless enterprise". Race and social justice In an undated interview at Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Tyson talked about being black and one of the most visible and well-known scientists in the world. He told a story about being interviewed about a plasma burst from the sun on a local Fox affiliate in 1989. "I'd never before in my life seen an interview with a black person on television for expertise that had nothing to do with being black. And at that point, I realized that one of the last stereotypes that prevailed among people who carry stereotypes is that, sort of, black people are somehow dumb. I wondered, maybe ... that's a way to undermine this sort of, this stereotype that prevailed about who's smart and who's dumb. I said to myself, 'I just have to be visible, or others like me, in that situation.' That would have a greater force on society than anything else I could imagine.
In 2005, at a conference at the National Academy of Sciences, Tyson responded to a question about whether genetic differences might keep women from working as scientists. He said that his goal to become an astrophysicist was "...hands down the path of most resistance through the forces ... of society". He continued: "My life experience tells me, when you don’t find blacks in the sciences, when you don’t find women in the sciences, I know these forces are real and I had to survive them in order to get where I am today. So before we start talking about genetic differences, you gotta come up with a system where there’s equal opportunity. Then we can start having that conversation.
In a 2014 interview with Grantland, Tyson said that he related his experience on that 2005 panel in an effort to make the point that the scientific question about genetic differences can't be answered until the social barriers are dismantled. "I'm saying before you even have that conversation, you have to be really sure that access to opportunity has been level." In that same interview, Tyson said that race is not a part of the point he is trying to make in his career or with his life. According to Tyson, then becomes the point of people's understanding of me, rather than the astrophysics. So it's a failed educational step for that to be the case. If you end up being distracted by that and not getting the message." He purposefully no longer speaks publicly about race. "I don't give talks on it. I don't even give Black History Month talks. I decline every single one of them. In fact, since 1993, I've declined every interview that has my being black as a premise of the interview.
NASA Tyson is an advocate for expanding the operations of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Arguing that "the most powerful agency on the dreams of a nation is currently underfunded to do what it needs to be doing". Tyson has suggested that the general public has a tendency to overestimate how much revenue is allocated to the space agency. At a March 2010 address, referencing the proportion of tax revenue spent on NASA, he stated, "By the way, how much does NASA cost? It's a half a penny on the dollar. Did you know that? The people are saying, 'Why are we spending money up there...' I ask them, 'How much do you think we're spending?' They say 'five cents, ten cents on a dollar.' It's a half a penny.
In March 2012, Tyson testified before the United States Senate Science Committee, stating that: Right now, NASA's annual budget is half a penny on your tax dollar. For twice that—a penny on a dollar—we can transform the country from a sullen, dispirited nation, weary of economic struggle, to one where it has reclaimed its 20th century birthright to dream of tomorrow.
Inspired by Tyson's advocacy and remarks, Penny4NASA, a campaign of the Space Advocates nonprofit, was founded in 2012 by John Zeller and advocates the doubling of NASA's budget to one percent of the federal budget.
In his book Space Chronicles: Facing the Ultimate Frontier Tyson argues that large and ambitious space exploration projects, like getting humans to Mars, will probably require some sort of military or economic driver in order to get the appropriate funding from the United States federal government.
Tyson has been featured as a guest interviewee on The Skeptics' Guide to the Universe, Radiolab, Skepticality, and The Joe Rogan Experience podcasts and has been in several of the Symphony of Science videos.
Tyson lived near the World Trade Center and was an eyewitness to the September 11, 2001 attacks. He wrote a widely circulated letter on what he saw. Footage he filmed on the day was included in the 2008 documentary film 102 Minutes That Changed America.
In 2007, Tyson was the keynote speaker during the dedication ceremony of Deerfield Academy's new science center, the Koch Center, named for David H. Koch '59. He emphasized the impact science will have on the twenty-first century, as well as explaining that investments into science may be costly, but their returns in the form of knowledge gained and piquing interest is invaluable. Tyson has also appeared as the keynote speaker at The Amazing Meeting, a science and skepticism conference hosted by the James Randi Educational Foundation.
Tyson made a guest appearance as a version of himself in the episode "Brain Storm" of Stargate Atlantis alongside Bill Nye and in the episode "The Apology Insufficiency" of The Big Bang Theory. Archive footage of him is used in the film Europa Report. Tyson also made an appearance in an episode of Martha Speaks as himself.
In a May 2011 StarTalk Radio show, The Political Science of the Daily Show, Tyson said he donates all income earned as a guest speaker.
Tyson is a frequent participant in the website Reddit's AMAs (Ask Me Anythings) where he is responsible for three of the top ten most popular AMAs of all time.
In Action Comics #14 (January 2013), which was published November 7, 2012, Tyson appears in the story, in which he determines that Superman's home planet, Krypton, orbited the red dwarf LHS 2520 in the constellation Corvus 27.1 lightyears from Earth. Tyson assisted DC Comics in selecting a real-life star that would be an appropriate parent star to Krypton, and picked Corvus, which is Latin for "Crow", and which is the mascot of Superman's high school, the Smallville Crows. Tyson also had a minor appearance as himself in the 2016 film Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice.
In May 2013, the Science Laureates of the United States Act of 2013 (H.R. 1891; 113th Congress) was introduced into Congress. Neil deGrasse Tyson was listed by at least two commentators as a possible nominee for the position of Science Laureate, if the act were to pass. On March 8, 2014, Tyson made a SXSW Interactive keynote presentation at the Austin Convention Center.
On June 3, 2014, Tyson co-reviewed Gravity in a CinemaSins episode. He made two more appearances with CinemaSins, co-reviewing Interstellar on September 29, 2015, and The Martian on March 31, 2016.
In 2016, Tyson narrated and was a script supervisor for the science documentary, Food Evolution, directed by Academy Award nominated director Scott Hamilton Kennedy. In the same year, Tyson made a guest appearance on the Avenged Sevenfold album The Stage, where he delivered a monolog on the track "Exist". In 2017, Tyson appeared on Logic's album Everybody as God, uncredited on various tracks, and credited on the song "AfricAryaN" as well as on "The Moon" on Musiq Soulchild's album Feel the Real.
In 2018, Tyson made a guest appearance on The Big Bang Theory as himself, together with fellow scientist Bill Nye, in the first episode of the show's final season ("The Conjugal Configuration").
• 2004 NASA Distinguished Public Service Medal.
• 2005 Science Writing Award.
• 2007 Klopsteg Memorial Award winner.
• 2009 Douglas S. Morrow Public Outreach Award from the Space Foundation for significant contributions to public awareness of space programs.
• 2009 Isaac Asimov Award from the American Humanist Association.
• 2014 Critics' Choice Television Award for Best Reality Show Host.
• 2014 Dunlap Prize.
• 2015 Public Welfare Medal from the National Academy of Sciences.
• 2015 Cosmos Award, Planetary Society.
• 2017 Hubbard Medal, National Geographic Society.
• 2017 Stephen Hawking Medal for Science Communication, Starmus.
• 2017 Grammy Award for Best Spoken Word Album nomination for Astrophysics for People in a Hurry.
• 2001 asteroid named: 13123 Tyson, renamed from Asteroid 1994KA by the International Astronomical Union.
• 2001 The Tech 100, voted by editors of Crain's Magazine to be among the 100 most influential technology leaders in New York.
• 2004 Fifty Most Important African-Americans in Research Science.
• 2007 Harvard 100: Most Influential, Harvard Alumni magazine, Cambridge, Massachusetts.
• 2007 The Time 100, voted by the editors of Time magazine as one of the 100 most influential persons in the world.
• 2008 Discover Magazine selected him as one of "The 10 Most Influential People in Science.
• 2010 elected a Fellow of the American Physical Society.
• 2000 Ramapo College, Mahwah, New Jersey.
• 2000 Dominican College, Orangeburg, New York.
• 2001 University of Richmond, Richmond, Virginia.
• 2002 Bloomfield College, Bloomfield, New Jersey.
• 2003 Northeastern University, Boston, Massachusetts.
• 2004 College of Staten Island, City University of New York.
• 2006 Pace University, New York City.
• 2007 Williams College, Williamstown, Massachusetts.
• 2007 Worcester Polytechnic Institute, Worcester, Massachusetts.
• 2008 University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
• 2010 University of Alabama in Huntsville, Huntsville, Alabama.
• 2010 Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, New York.
• 2010 Eastern Connecticut State University, Willimantic, Connecticut.
• 2011 Gettysburg College, Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.
• 2012 Mount Holyoke College, South Hadley, Massachusetts.
• 2012 Western New England University, Springfield, Massachusetts.
• 2015 University of Massachusetts-Amherst, Amherst, Massachusetts.
• 2017 Baruch College, New York, New York.
• 2018 Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut.
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".
Early life
Tyson was born in Manhattan as the second of three children, into a family living in the Bronx. His mother, Sunchita Maria Tyson (née Feliciano), was a gerontologist for the U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare, and is of Puerto Rican descent. His African-American father, Cyril deGrasse Tyson (1927–2016), was a sociologist, human resource commissioner for New York City mayor John Lindsay, and the first Director of Harlem Youth Opportunities Unlimited. Tyson has two siblings: Stephen Joseph Tyson and Lynn Antipas Tyson. 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.Tyson grew up in the Castle Hill neighborhood of the Bronx, and later in Riverdale. From kindergarten throughout high school, Tyson attended public schools in the Bronx: P.S. 36, P.S. 81, the Riverdale Kingsbridge Academy (then called "P.S. 141"), and The Bronx High School of Science (1972–1976) where he was captain of the wrestling team and editor-in-chief of the Physical Science Journal. His interest in astronomy began at the age of nine after visiting the sky theater of the Hayden Planetarium. He recalled that "so strong was that imprint [of the night sky] that I'm certain that I had no choice in the matter, that in fact, the universe called me." During high school, Tyson attended astronomy courses offered by the Hayden Planetarium, which he called "the most formative period" of his life. He credited Dr. Mark Chartrand III, director of the planetarium at the time, as his "first intellectual role model" and his enthusiastic teaching style mixed with humor inspired Tyson to communicate the universe to others the way he did.
Tyson obsessively studied astronomy in his teen years, and eventually even gained some fame in the astronomy community by giving lectures on the subject at the age of fifteen. Astronomer Carl Sagan, who was a faculty member at Cornell University, tried to recruit Tyson to Cornell for undergraduate studies. In his book, The Sky Is Not the Limit, Tyson wrote:
My letter of application had been dripping with an interest in the universe. The admission office, unbeknownst to me, had forwarded my application to Carl Sagan's attention. Within weeks, I received a personal letter...
Tyson revisited this moment on his first episode of Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey. Pulling out a 1975 calendar belonging to the famous astronomer, he found the day Sagan invited the 17-year-old to spend a day in Ithaca. Sagan had offered to put him up for the night if his bus back to the Bronx did not come. Tyson said, "I already knew I wanted to become a scientist. But that afternoon, I learned from Carl the kind of person I wanted to become.
Tyson chose to attend Harvard where he majored in physics and lived in Currier House. He was a member of the crew team during his freshman year, but returned to wrestling, lettering in his senior year. He was also active in dance, in styles including jazz, ballet, Afro-Caribbean, and Latin Ballroom.
Tyson earned an AB degree in physics at Harvard College in 1980 and then began his graduate work at the University of Texas at Austin, from which he received an MA degree in astronomy in 1983. By his own account, he did not spend as much time in the research lab as he should have. His professors encouraged him to consider alternative careers and the committee for his doctoral dissertation was dissolved, ending his pursuit of a doctorate from the University of Texas.
Tyson was a lecturer in astronomy at the University of Maryland from 1986 to 1987 and in 1988, he was accepted into the astronomy graduate program at Columbia University, where he earned an MPhil degree in astrophysics in 1989, and a PhD degree in astrophysics in 1991 under the supervision of Professor R. Michael Rich. Rich obtained funding to support Tyson's doctoral research from NASA and the ARCS foundation enabling Tyson to attend international meetings in Italy, Switzerland, Chile, and South Africa and to hire students to help him with data reduction. In the course of his thesis work, he observed using the 0.91 m telescope at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile, where he obtained images for the Calán/Tololo Supernova Survey helping to further their work in establishing Type Ia supernovae as standard candles. During his thesis research at Columbia University, Tyson became acquainted with Professor David Spergel at Princeton University, who visited Columbia University in the course of collaborating with his thesis advisor on the Galactic bulge typically found in spiral galaxies.
Career
Tyson's research has focused on observations in cosmology, stellar evolution, galactic astronomy, bulges, and stellar formation. He has held numerous positions at institutions including the University of Maryland, Princeton University, the American Museum of Natural History, and the Hayden Planetarium.In 1994, Tyson joined the Hayden Planetarium as a staff scientist while he was a research affiliate in Princeton University. He became acting director of the planetarium in June 1995 and was appointed director in 1996. As director, he oversaw the planetarium's $210 million reconstruction project, which was completed in 2000. Upon being asked for his thoughts on becoming director, Tyson said "when I was a kid... there were scientists and educators on the staff at the Hayden Planetarium... who invested their time and energy in my enlightenment... and I've never forgotten that. And to end up back there as its director, I feel this deep sense of duty, that I serve in the same capacity for people who come through the facility today, that others served for me".
Tyson has written a number of popular books on astronomy. In 1995, he began to write the "Universe" column for Natural History magazine. In a column he authored for a special edition of the magazine, called "City of Stars", in 2002, Tyson popularized the term "Manhattanhenge" to describe the two days annually on which the evening sun aligns with the street grid in Manhattan, making the sunset visible along unobstructed side streets. He had coined the term in 1996, inspired by how the phenomenon recalls the sun's solstice alignment with the Stonehenge monument in England. Tyson's column also influenced his work as a professor with The Great Courses.
In 2001, U.S. President George W. Bush appointed Tyson to serve on the Commission on the Future of the United States Aerospace Industry and in 2004 to serve on the President's Commission on Implementation of United States Space Exploration Policy, the latter better known as the "Moon, Mars, and Beyond" commission. Soon afterward, he was awarded the NASA Distinguished Public Service Medal, the highest civilian honor bestowed by NASA.
In 2004, Tyson hosted the four-part Origins miniseries of the PBS Nova series, and, with Donald Goldsmith, co-authored the companion volume for this series, Origins: Fourteen Billion Years Of Cosmic Evolution. He again collaborated with Goldsmith as the narrator on the documentary 400 Years of the Telescope, which premiered on PBS in April 2009.
As director of the Hayden Planetarium, Tyson bucked traditional thinking in order to keep Pluto from being referred to as the ninth planet in exhibits at the center. Tyson has explained that he wanted to look at commonalities between objects, grouping the terrestrial planets together, the gas giants together, and Pluto with like objects, and to get away from simply counting the planets. He has stated on The Colbert Report, The Daily Show, and BBC Horizon that this decision has resulted in large amounts of hate mail, much of it from children. In 2006, the International Astronomical Union (IAU) confirmed this assessment by changing Pluto to the dwarf planet classification. Tyson recounted the heated online debate on the Cambridge Conference Network (CCNet), a "widely read, UK-based Internet chat group", following Benny Peiser's renewed call for reclassification of Pluto's status. Peiser's entry, in which he posted articles from the AP and The Boston Globe, spawned from The New York Times's article entitled "Pluto's Not a Planet? Only in New York".
Tyson has been vice-president, president, and chairman of the board of the Planetary Society. He was also the host of the PBS program Nova ScienceNow until 2011. He attended and was a speaker at the Beyond Belief: Science, Religion, Reason and Survival symposium in November 2006. In 2007, Tyson was chosen to be a regular on The History Channel's popular series The Universe.
In May 2009, Tyson launched a one-hour radio talk show called StarTalk, which he co-hosted with comedian Lynne Koplitz. The show was syndicated on Sunday afternoons on KTLK AM in Los Angeles and WHFS in Washington DC. The show lasted for thirteen weeks, but was resurrected in December 2010 and then, co-hosted with comedians Chuck Nice and Leighann Lord instead of Koplitz. Guests range from colleagues in science to celebrities such as GZA, Wil Wheaton, Sarah Silverman, and Bill Maher. The show is available via the Internet through a live stream or in the form of a podcast.
In April 2011, Tyson was the keynote speaker at the 93rd International Convention of the Phi Theta Kappa International Honor Society of the Two-year School. He and James Randi delivered a lecture entitled Skepticism, which related directly with the convention's theme of The Democratization of Information: Power, Peril, and Promise.
In 2012, Tyson announced that he would appear in a YouTube series based on his radio show StarTalk. A premiere date for the show has not been announced, but it will be distributed on the Nerdist YouTube Channel. On February 28, 2014, Tyson was a celebrity guest at the White House Student Film Festival.
In 2014, Tyson helped revive Carl Sagan's Cosmos: A Personal Voyage television series, presenting Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey on both FOX and the National Geographic Channel. Thirteen episodes were aired in the first season, and Tyson has stated that if a second season were produced, he would pass the role of host to someone else in the science world. In early January, 2018, it was announced that a second season of Cosmos was in production, and that Tyson would once again act as host.
On April 20, 2015, Tyson began hosting a late-night talk show entitled StarTalk on the National Geographic Channel, where Tyson interviews pop culture celebrities and asks them about their life experiences with science.
Tyson is co-developing a sandbox video game with Whatnot Entertainment, Neil deGrasse Tyson Presents: Space Odyssey, which aims to help provide players with a realistic simulation of developing a space-faring culture, incorporating educational materials about space and technology. The game was anticipated for release in 2018.
Views
Tyson has written and broadcast extensively about his views of science, spirituality, and the spirituality of science, including the essays "The Perimeter of Ignorance" and "Holy Wars", both appearing in Natural History magazine and the 2006 Beyond Belief workshop. In an interview with comedian Paul Mecurio, Tyson offered his definition of spirituality: "For me, when I say spiritual, I’m referring to a feeling you would have that connects you to the universe in a way that it may defy simple vocabulary. We think about the universe as an intellectual playground, which it surely is, but the moment you learn something that touches an emotion rather than just something intellectual, I would call that a spiritual encounter with the universe." Tyson has argued that many great historical scientists' belief in intelligent design limited their scientific inquiries, to the detriment of the advance of scientific knowledge.When asked during a question session at the University at Buffalo if he believed in a higher power, Tyson responded: "Every account of a higher power that I've seen described, of all religions that I've seen, include many statements with regard to the benevolence of that power. When I look at the universe and all the ways the universe wants to kill us, I find it hard to reconcile that with statements of beneficence. In an interview with Big Think, Tyson said, "So, what people are really after is what is my stance on religion or spirituality or God, and I would say if I find a word that came closest, it would be 'agnostic' ... at the end of the day I'd rather not be any category at all." Additionally, in the same interview with Big Think, Tyson mentioned that he edited Wikipedia's entry on him to include the fact that he is an agnostic:
I'm constantly claimed by atheists. I find this intriguing. In fact, on my Wiki page – I didn't create the Wiki page, others did, and I'm flattered that people cared enough about my life to assemble it – and it said "Neil deGrasse Tyson is an atheist." I said, "Well that's not really true." I said, "Neil deGrasse Tyson is an agnostic." I went back a week later, it said "Neil deGrasse Tyson is an atheist" again – within a week! – and I said, "What's up with that?" and I said "Alright, I have to word it a little differently." So I said, okay "Neil deGrasse Tyson, widely claimed by atheists, is actually an agnostic."
During the interview "Called by the Universe: A Conversation with Neil deGrasse Tyson" in 2009, Tyson said: "I can't agree to the claims by atheists that I'm one of that community. I don't have the time, energy, interest of conducting myself that way... I'm not trying to convert people. I don't care.
In March 2014, philosopher and secularism proponent Massimo Pigliucci asked Tyson "What is it you think about God?" Tyson replied "I remain unconvinced by any claims anyone has ever made about the existence or the power of a divine force operating in the universe." Pigliucci then asked him why he expressed discomfort with the label "atheist" in his Big Think video. Tyson replied by reiterating his dislike for one-word labels, saying "That's what adjectives are for. What kind of atheist are you? Are you an ardent atheist? Are you a passive atheist? An apathetic atheist? Do you rally, or do you just not even care? So I'd be on the 'I really don't care' side of that, if you had to find adjectives to put in front of the word 'atheist'." Pigliucci contrasted Tyson with scientist Richard Dawkins: really does consider, at this point, himself to be an atheist activist. You very clearly made the point that you are not." Tyson replied: "I completely respect that activity. He's fulfilling a really important role out there.
Tyson has spoken about philosophy on numerous occasions. In March 2014, during an episode of The Nerdist Podcast, he stated that philosophy is "useless" and that a philosophy major "can really mess you up", which was met with disapproval. The philosopher Massimo Pigliucci later criticized him for "dismissing philosophy as a useless enterprise". Race and social justice In an undated interview at Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Tyson talked about being black and one of the most visible and well-known scientists in the world. He told a story about being interviewed about a plasma burst from the sun on a local Fox affiliate in 1989. "I'd never before in my life seen an interview with a black person on television for expertise that had nothing to do with being black. And at that point, I realized that one of the last stereotypes that prevailed among people who carry stereotypes is that, sort of, black people are somehow dumb. I wondered, maybe ... that's a way to undermine this sort of, this stereotype that prevailed about who's smart and who's dumb. I said to myself, 'I just have to be visible, or others like me, in that situation.' That would have a greater force on society than anything else I could imagine.
In 2005, at a conference at the National Academy of Sciences, Tyson responded to a question about whether genetic differences might keep women from working as scientists. He said that his goal to become an astrophysicist was "...hands down the path of most resistance through the forces ... of society". He continued: "My life experience tells me, when you don’t find blacks in the sciences, when you don’t find women in the sciences, I know these forces are real and I had to survive them in order to get where I am today. So before we start talking about genetic differences, you gotta come up with a system where there’s equal opportunity. Then we can start having that conversation.
In a 2014 interview with Grantland, Tyson said that he related his experience on that 2005 panel in an effort to make the point that the scientific question about genetic differences can't be answered until the social barriers are dismantled. "I'm saying before you even have that conversation, you have to be really sure that access to opportunity has been level." In that same interview, Tyson said that race is not a part of the point he is trying to make in his career or with his life. According to Tyson, then becomes the point of people's understanding of me, rather than the astrophysics. So it's a failed educational step for that to be the case. If you end up being distracted by that and not getting the message." He purposefully no longer speaks publicly about race. "I don't give talks on it. I don't even give Black History Month talks. I decline every single one of them. In fact, since 1993, I've declined every interview that has my being black as a premise of the interview.
NASA Tyson is an advocate for expanding the operations of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Arguing that "the most powerful agency on the dreams of a nation is currently underfunded to do what it needs to be doing". Tyson has suggested that the general public has a tendency to overestimate how much revenue is allocated to the space agency. At a March 2010 address, referencing the proportion of tax revenue spent on NASA, he stated, "By the way, how much does NASA cost? It's a half a penny on the dollar. Did you know that? The people are saying, 'Why are we spending money up there...' I ask them, 'How much do you think we're spending?' They say 'five cents, ten cents on a dollar.' It's a half a penny.
In March 2012, Tyson testified before the United States Senate Science Committee, stating that: Right now, NASA's annual budget is half a penny on your tax dollar. For twice that—a penny on a dollar—we can transform the country from a sullen, dispirited nation, weary of economic struggle, to one where it has reclaimed its 20th century birthright to dream of tomorrow.
Inspired by Tyson's advocacy and remarks, Penny4NASA, a campaign of the Space Advocates nonprofit, was founded in 2012 by John Zeller and advocates the doubling of NASA's budget to one percent of the federal budget.
In his book Space Chronicles: Facing the Ultimate Frontier Tyson argues that large and ambitious space exploration projects, like getting humans to Mars, will probably require some sort of military or economic driver in order to get the appropriate funding from the United States federal government.
Media appearances
As a science communicator, Tyson regularly appears on television, radio, and various other media outlets. He has been a regular guest on The Colbert Report, and host Stephen Colbert refers to him in his comedic book I Am America (And So Can You!), noting in his chapter on scientists that most scientists are "decent, well-intentioned people", but, presumably tongue-in-cheek, that "Neil DeGrasse Tyson is an absolute monster. He has appeared numerous times on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. He has made appearances on Late Night with Conan O'Brien, The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, Late Night with Jimmy Fallon, and The Rachel Maddow Show. He served as one of the central interviewees on the various episodes of the History Channel science program, The Universe. Tyson participated on the NPR radio quiz program Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me! in 2007 and 2015. He has appeared several times on Real Time with Bill Maher, and he was also featured on an episode of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? as the ask-the-expert lifeline. He has spoken numerous times on the Philadelphia morning show, Preston and Steve, on 93.3 WMMR, as well as on SiriusXM's Ron and Fez and The Opie and Anthony Show.Tyson has been featured as a guest interviewee on The Skeptics' Guide to the Universe, Radiolab, Skepticality, and The Joe Rogan Experience podcasts and has been in several of the Symphony of Science videos.
Tyson lived near the World Trade Center and was an eyewitness to the September 11, 2001 attacks. He wrote a widely circulated letter on what he saw. Footage he filmed on the day was included in the 2008 documentary film 102 Minutes That Changed America.
In 2007, Tyson was the keynote speaker during the dedication ceremony of Deerfield Academy's new science center, the Koch Center, named for David H. Koch '59. He emphasized the impact science will have on the twenty-first century, as well as explaining that investments into science may be costly, but their returns in the form of knowledge gained and piquing interest is invaluable. Tyson has also appeared as the keynote speaker at The Amazing Meeting, a science and skepticism conference hosted by the James Randi Educational Foundation.
Tyson made a guest appearance as a version of himself in the episode "Brain Storm" of Stargate Atlantis alongside Bill Nye and in the episode "The Apology Insufficiency" of The Big Bang Theory. Archive footage of him is used in the film Europa Report. Tyson also made an appearance in an episode of Martha Speaks as himself.
In a May 2011 StarTalk Radio show, The Political Science of the Daily Show, Tyson said he donates all income earned as a guest speaker.
Tyson is a frequent participant in the website Reddit's AMAs (Ask Me Anythings) where he is responsible for three of the top ten most popular AMAs of all time.
In Action Comics #14 (January 2013), which was published November 7, 2012, Tyson appears in the story, in which he determines that Superman's home planet, Krypton, orbited the red dwarf LHS 2520 in the constellation Corvus 27.1 lightyears from Earth. Tyson assisted DC Comics in selecting a real-life star that would be an appropriate parent star to Krypton, and picked Corvus, which is Latin for "Crow", and which is the mascot of Superman's high school, the Smallville Crows. Tyson also had a minor appearance as himself in the 2016 film Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice.
In May 2013, the Science Laureates of the United States Act of 2013 (H.R. 1891; 113th Congress) was introduced into Congress. Neil deGrasse Tyson was listed by at least two commentators as a possible nominee for the position of Science Laureate, if the act were to pass. On March 8, 2014, Tyson made a SXSW Interactive keynote presentation at the Austin Convention Center.
On June 3, 2014, Tyson co-reviewed Gravity in a CinemaSins episode. He made two more appearances with CinemaSins, co-reviewing Interstellar on September 29, 2015, and The Martian on March 31, 2016.
In 2016, Tyson narrated and was a script supervisor for the science documentary, Food Evolution, directed by Academy Award nominated director Scott Hamilton Kennedy. In the same year, Tyson made a guest appearance on the Avenged Sevenfold album The Stage, where he delivered a monolog on the track "Exist". In 2017, Tyson appeared on Logic's album Everybody as God, uncredited on various tracks, and credited on the song "AfricAryaN" as well as on "The Moon" on Musiq Soulchild's album Feel the Real.
In 2018, Tyson made a guest appearance on The Big Bang Theory as himself, together with fellow scientist Bill Nye, in the first episode of the show's final season ("The Conjugal Configuration").
Personal life
Tyson lives in the Tribeca neighborhood of Lower Manhattan with his wife, Alice Young. They have two children: Miranda and Travis. Tyson met his wife in a physics class at the University of Texas at Austin. They married in 1988 and named their first child Miranda, after the smallest of Uranus' five major moons. Tyson is a wine enthusiast whose collection was featured in the May 2000 issue of the Wine Spectator and the Spring 2005 issue of The World of Fine Wine.Recognition
Awards
• 2001 Medal of Excellence, Columbia University, New York City.• 2004 NASA Distinguished Public Service Medal.
• 2005 Science Writing Award.
• 2007 Klopsteg Memorial Award winner.
• 2009 Douglas S. Morrow Public Outreach Award from the Space Foundation for significant contributions to public awareness of space programs.
• 2009 Isaac Asimov Award from the American Humanist Association.
• 2014 Critics' Choice Television Award for Best Reality Show Host.
• 2014 Dunlap Prize.
• 2015 Public Welfare Medal from the National Academy of Sciences.
• 2015 Cosmos Award, Planetary Society.
• 2017 Hubbard Medal, National Geographic Society.
• 2017 Stephen Hawking Medal for Science Communication, Starmus.
• 2017 Grammy Award for Best Spoken Word Album nomination for Astrophysics for People in a Hurry.
Honors
• 2000 Sexiest Astrophysicist Alive, People magazine.• 2001 asteroid named: 13123 Tyson, renamed from Asteroid 1994KA by the International Astronomical Union.
• 2001 The Tech 100, voted by editors of Crain's Magazine to be among the 100 most influential technology leaders in New York.
• 2004 Fifty Most Important African-Americans in Research Science.
• 2007 Harvard 100: Most Influential, Harvard Alumni magazine, Cambridge, Massachusetts.
• 2007 The Time 100, voted by the editors of Time magazine as one of the 100 most influential persons in the world.
• 2008 Discover Magazine selected him as one of "The 10 Most Influential People in Science.
• 2010 elected a Fellow of the American Physical Society.
Honorary doctorates
• 1997 York College, City University of New York.• 2000 Ramapo College, Mahwah, New Jersey.
• 2000 Dominican College, Orangeburg, New York.
• 2001 University of Richmond, Richmond, Virginia.
• 2002 Bloomfield College, Bloomfield, New Jersey.
• 2003 Northeastern University, Boston, Massachusetts.
• 2004 College of Staten Island, City University of New York.
• 2006 Pace University, New York City.
• 2007 Williams College, Williamstown, Massachusetts.
• 2007 Worcester Polytechnic Institute, Worcester, Massachusetts.
• 2008 University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
• 2010 University of Alabama in Huntsville, Huntsville, Alabama.
• 2010 Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, New York.
• 2010 Eastern Connecticut State University, Willimantic, Connecticut.
• 2011 Gettysburg College, Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.
• 2012 Mount Holyoke College, South Hadley, Massachusetts.
• 2012 Western New England University, Springfield, Massachusetts.
• 2015 University of Massachusetts-Amherst, Amherst, Massachusetts.
• 2017 Baruch College, New York, New York.
• 2018 Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut.
Cynthia Jane Kenyon (February 21, 1954) is an American molecular biologist and biogerontologist known for her genetic dissection of aging in a widely used model organism, the roundworm Caenorhabditis elegans and professor at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF).
Since 1986 she has been at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), where she was the Herbert Boyer Distinguished Professor of Biochemistry and Biophysics and is now an American Cancer Society Professor. In 1999 she co-founded Elixir Pharmaceuticals with Leonard Guarente to try to discover and develop drugs that would slow down the process that makes people age.
In April 2014, Kenyon was named Vice President of Aging Research at Calico, a new company focused on health, well-being, and longevity. Prior to that, she served as a part-time advisor beginning in November 2013. Kenyon will remain affiliated with UCSF as an emeritus professor.
Her early work led to the discovery that Hox genes, which were known to pattern the body segments of the fruit fly (Drosophila) also pattern the body of C. elegans. These findings demonstrated that Hox genes were not simply involved in segmentation, as thought, but instead were part of a much more ancient and fundamental metazoan patterning system.
Michael Klass discovered that lifespan of C. elegans could be altered by mutations, but Klass believed that the effect was due to reduced food consumption (caloric restriction). Thomas Johnson later showed that the 65% life extension effect was due to the mutation itself rather than due to caloric restriction. In 1993, Kenyon's discovery that a single-gene mutation (Daf-2) could double the lifespan of C. elegans and that this could be reversed by a second mutation in daf-16m, sparked an intensive study of the molecular biology of aging, including work by Leonard Guarente and David Sinclair. Kenyon's findings have led to the discovery that an evolutionarily-conserved hormone signaling system influences aging in other organisms, perhaps also including mammals.
Kenyon has received many honors, including the King Faisal Prize for Medicine, the Association of American Medical Colleges Award for Distinguished Research, the Ilse & Helmut Wachter Award for Exceptional Scientific Achievement, and La Fondation IPSEN Prize, for her findings. She is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She was President of the Genetics Society of America for 2003. She is also one of featured biologists in the 1995 science documentary Death by Design / The Life and Times of Life and Times.
• I. & H. Wachter Award, I. & H. Wachter Foundation (2005).
In 2000, when she discovered that putting sugar on the worms' food shortened their lifespans, she stopped eating high glycemic index carbohydrates and started eating a low-carbohydrate diet.
She briefly experimented with a calorie restriction diet for two days, but couldn't stand the constant hunger.
Career
Cynthia Kenyon graduated valedictorian in chemistry and biochemistry from the University of Georgia in 1976. She received her Ph.D. in 1981 from MIT where, in Graham Walker's laboratory, she looked for genes on the basis of their activity profiles, discovering that DNA-damaging agents activate a battery of DNA repair genes in E. coli. She then did postdoctoral studies with Nobel laureate Sydney Brenner at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, England, studying the development of C. elegans.Since 1986 she has been at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), where she was the Herbert Boyer Distinguished Professor of Biochemistry and Biophysics and is now an American Cancer Society Professor. In 1999 she co-founded Elixir Pharmaceuticals with Leonard Guarente to try to discover and develop drugs that would slow down the process that makes people age.
In April 2014, Kenyon was named Vice President of Aging Research at Calico, a new company focused on health, well-being, and longevity. Prior to that, she served as a part-time advisor beginning in November 2013. Kenyon will remain affiliated with UCSF as an emeritus professor.
Her early work led to the discovery that Hox genes, which were known to pattern the body segments of the fruit fly (Drosophila) also pattern the body of C. elegans. These findings demonstrated that Hox genes were not simply involved in segmentation, as thought, but instead were part of a much more ancient and fundamental metazoan patterning system.
Michael Klass discovered that lifespan of C. elegans could be altered by mutations, but Klass believed that the effect was due to reduced food consumption (caloric restriction). Thomas Johnson later showed that the 65% life extension effect was due to the mutation itself rather than due to caloric restriction. In 1993, Kenyon's discovery that a single-gene mutation (Daf-2) could double the lifespan of C. elegans and that this could be reversed by a second mutation in daf-16m, sparked an intensive study of the molecular biology of aging, including work by Leonard Guarente and David Sinclair. Kenyon's findings have led to the discovery that an evolutionarily-conserved hormone signaling system influences aging in other organisms, perhaps also including mammals.
Kenyon has received many honors, including the King Faisal Prize for Medicine, the Association of American Medical Colleges Award for Distinguished Research, the Ilse & Helmut Wachter Award for Exceptional Scientific Achievement, and La Fondation IPSEN Prize, for her findings. She is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She was President of the Genetics Society of America for 2003. She is also one of featured biologists in the 1995 science documentary Death by Design / The Life and Times of Life and Times.
• I. & H. Wachter Award, I. & H. Wachter Foundation (2005).
Personal diet
Kenyon's research prompted her to make personal dietary changes.In 2000, when she discovered that putting sugar on the worms' food shortened their lifespans, she stopped eating high glycemic index carbohydrates and started eating a low-carbohydrate diet.
She briefly experimented with a calorie restriction diet for two days, but couldn't stand the constant hunger.
Rafael Yuste (born April 25, 1963 in Madrid) is a Spanish neurobiologist and one of the initiators of the BRAIN Initiative announced in 2013.
Yuste then moved to David Tank's group at Bell Laboratories where he worked four years as a postdoc, combining calcium imaging with the two-photon microscope invented by Winfried Denk and, through discussions with John Hopfield and David Tank, becoming convinced of the importance of neural networks (rather than just single neurons) for understanding the functioning of the brain (connectionism).
In 1996 Yuste became an assistant professor in the Department of Biological Sciences at Columbia University, obtaining tenure in 2002 and becoming a full professor in 2006. Since 2004 he is also co-director of the Kavli Institute for Brain Science at Columbia University and since 2014 the director of Columbia's Neurotechnology Center.
In 2013 Yuste received the NIH Director's Pioneer Award with a grant of US$2.5 million to fund research to test the hypothesis of the cortex as a random circuit using novel two-photon imaging methods in a large-scale study of the mouse cortical microcircuit.
As of 2018 Yuste has published more than 200 papers. According to Google Scholar he has been cited more than 29,000 times for an h index of 94.
As an Ikerbasque Research Professor, Yuste works several weeks per year at the Donosti International Physic Center in San Sebastian, Spain. In addition, he has served, or currently serves, on the scientific advisory board of several institutes, foundations, and companies in the US, Spain, and Israel, such as the Fundación Gaeda, the Allen Institute, the Biophysics Institute BIOFISIKA a joint Research Centre of the Spanish National Research Council and the University of the Basque Country or Harvard's Conte Center. Yuste has served on the editorial board of numerous professional journals, among them Frontiers in Neural Circuits (chief editor, 2006-2013) and Cerebral Cortex (associate editor since 1998).
Biography
Yuste's interest in neuroscience arose early, inspired by books like Santiago Ramón y Cajal's Los Tónicos de la Voluntad: Reglas y consejos sobre investigación científica and supported by his parents. He studied medicine at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid and its Fundación Jiménez Díaz Hospital (1982-1987). Finding the treatment and understanding of mental diseases as "primitive", Yuste decided that instead of practicing medicine he would work on laying the scientific basis for future treatments through basic biological research. He worked for two summers (1985/86) in the laboratory of the Nobel laureate Sydney Brenner at the University of Cambridge, but the budget cuts of Margaret Thatcher's government made him look for PhD opportunities in the United States. In 1987 he was admitted to Rockefeller University and joined the group of Nobel laureate Torsten Wiesel, working with Lawrence C. Katz. There he developed the calcium imaging technique to measure and monitor the activity of neuronal populations. The technique is based on the fact that when an electric signal depolarizes a neuron, its calcium channels are activated, thus allowing Ca2+ ions to enter the cell. If one brings a calcium-sensitive dye into neurons in the brain, one can detect under the microscope when a neuron is active. The technique is detailed in Yuste's doctoral thesis Optical studies of calcium dynamics in developing neocortical neurons (1992), which was directed by Wiesel and Katz. It has since become one of the technical pillars of neurobiology.Yuste then moved to David Tank's group at Bell Laboratories where he worked four years as a postdoc, combining calcium imaging with the two-photon microscope invented by Winfried Denk and, through discussions with John Hopfield and David Tank, becoming convinced of the importance of neural networks (rather than just single neurons) for understanding the functioning of the brain (connectionism).
In 1996 Yuste became an assistant professor in the Department of Biological Sciences at Columbia University, obtaining tenure in 2002 and becoming a full professor in 2006. Since 2004 he is also co-director of the Kavli Institute for Brain Science at Columbia University and since 2014 the director of Columbia's Neurotechnology Center.
In 2013 Yuste received the NIH Director's Pioneer Award with a grant of US$2.5 million to fund research to test the hypothesis of the cortex as a random circuit using novel two-photon imaging methods in a large-scale study of the mouse cortical microcircuit.
As of 2018 Yuste has published more than 200 papers. According to Google Scholar he has been cited more than 29,000 times for an h index of 94.
As an Ikerbasque Research Professor, Yuste works several weeks per year at the Donosti International Physic Center in San Sebastian, Spain. In addition, he has served, or currently serves, on the scientific advisory board of several institutes, foundations, and companies in the US, Spain, and Israel, such as the Fundación Gaeda, the Allen Institute, the Biophysics Institute BIOFISIKA a joint Research Centre of the Spanish National Research Council and the University of the Basque Country or Harvard's Conte Center. Yuste has served on the editorial board of numerous professional journals, among them Frontiers in Neural Circuits (chief editor, 2006-2013) and Cerebral Cortex (associate editor since 1998).
Brain Activity Map and BRAIN Initiative
In 2011 at a meeting with funding agencies, Yuste proposed the goal of developing technologies to "record every spike from every neuron" and then co-authored together with George M. Church, Paul Alivisatos, Ralph Greenspan, and Michael Roukes a white paper to elaborate this idea as a large-scale scientific project (then called the "Brain Activity Map Project") modelled on the Human Genome Project. Two years later then president Barack Obama announced the US BRAIN Initiative that now funds neuroscience research in over 500 laboratories and is slated to last until 2025. Yuste has warned against spreading the funds of the initiative too thin and argued that a focused effort is required to develop the technologies needed for large-scale, real-time brain imaging with single-neuron resolution that would be made available at observatory-like centers to the scientific community. Yuste has also spearheaded the development of ethical guidelines for neurotechnology and AI (ref Goering 2016 and Yuste 2017), proposing that five new NeuroRights be added to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, to protect human mental privacy, identity, agency and equal access to cognitive enhancement and also prevent algorithm biases. In 2018, professor Yuste was awarded the Eliasson/Tallberg Foundation prize due to his commitment to exploring the ethical implications of using emerging AI in the field of neurotechnology. This prize, which is " awarded annually to outstanding leaders who demonstrate the willingness and capacity to address the complexity of 21st-century challenges in innovative, risk-taking, and ethical ways, and whose work is global in aspiration or implication and is rooted in universal values. is a substantial honor.Selected honors and awards
• 1985 Young Researcher Award, National Research Council, Cajal Institute, Madrid, Spain • 1996 Sloan Research Fellowship • 1996 Klingenstein Foundation Young Investigator Award • 1997 Basil O'Connor Young Investigator Award • 1997 EJLB Foundation Young Investigator Award • 1997 Epilepsy Foundation of America Young Investigator Award • 1997 Beckman Young Investigators Award • 2001 John Merck Scholars Award • 2002 Mayor's Young Investigator Award for Excellence in Science and Technology, New York City • 2002 Young Investigator Award, Society for Neuroscience • 2013 NIH Director's Pioneer Award • 2014 Lenfest Faculty Award Columbia University • 2012 Named “Five to Watch in 2013”, Nature Magazine • 2015 Premio Lección Conmemorativa Jiménez Díaz • 2015 Corresponding Member Spanish Royal Academy of Science • 2015 Corresponding Member Spanish Royal Academy of Medicine • 2017 Alumni Prize, Universidad Autónoma Madrid • 2016 Telva Science Prize • 2017 Eliasson Global Leadership Prize • 2017 “Hero” Award, Fundación Querer • 2018 Eliasson Global Leadership Prize
Jennifer Anne Doudna (born February 19, 1964) is an American biochemist. She is a Li Ka Shing Chancellor Chair Professor in the Department of Chemistry and the Department of Molecular and Cell Biology at the University of California, Berkeley. Doudna has been an investigator with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) since 1997, and since 2018 she holds the position of senior investigator at the Gladstone Institutes as well as that of professor at the University of California, San Francisco.
Doudna has been a leading figure in what is referred to as the "CRISPR revolution" for her fundamental work and leadership in developing CRISPR-mediated genome editing. In 2012, Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier were the first to propose that CRISPR-Cas9 (enzymes from bacteria that control microbial immunity) could be used for programmable editing of genomes, which is now considered one of the most significant discoveries in the history of biology.
Doudna has made fundamental contributions in biochemistry and genetics and received many prestigious awards and fellowships including the 2000 Alan T. Waterman Award for her research on the structure as determined by X-ray crystallography of a ribozyme, and the 2015 Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences for CRISPR-Cas9 genome editing technology (with Charpentier). She has been a co-recipient of the Gruber Prize in Genetics (2015), the Canada Gairdner International Award (2016), and the Japan Prize (2017). Outside the scientific community, she has been named one of the Time 100 most influential people in 2015 (with Charpentier), and she was listed as a runner-up for Time Person of the Year in 2016 alongside other CRISPR researchers.
Growing up in Hilo, Hawaii, Doudna was fascinated by the environmental beauty of the island and its exotic plants and animals. They built her sense of curiosity about how nature works and she wanted to understand the underlying biological mechanisms. When she was in school, she developed her interest in science and mathematics. Her father fostered a culture of intellectual pursuit in her home. He enjoyed reading about science and filled the home with plenty of books on popular science. When she was in the sixth grade, her father gave her a copy of The Double Helix (a book by James Watson). When she was in high school, she was influenced by Miss Wong, a chemistry teacher.
Doudna was promoted to the position of Henry Ford II Professor of Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry at Yale in 2000. In 2000–2001, she was Robert Burns Woodward Visiting Professor of Chemistry at Harvard University.
The CRISPR system created a new straightforward way to edit DNA and there was a rush to patent the technique. Doudna and UC Berkeley collaborators applied for a patent and so did a group at the Broad Institute affiliated with MIT and Harvard. Zhang at the Broad Institute had shown that CRISPR-Cas9 could edit genes in cultured human cells a few months after Doudna and Charpentier published their method. Before the UC Berkeley patent application was decided, a patent was granted to the Broad investigators and UC Berkeley filed a lawsuit against the decision. In 2017, the court decided in favor of the Broad Institute, who claimed that they had initiated the research earliest and had first applied it to human cell engineering thus supporting editing in human cells with evidence but that the UC Berkeley group had only suggested this application. UC Berkeley appealed on grounds that they had clearly discussed and spelled out how to do the application the Broad had pursued. In September 2018, the appeals court decided in favor of the Broad Institute's patent. Meanwhile, UC Berkeley and co-applicants' patent to cover the general technique was also granted. To further cloud the issue, in Europe the claim of the Broad Institute, to have initiated the research first, was disallowed. The rejection was due to a procedural flaw in the application involving a different set of personnel listed in the lawsuit and the patent application, leading to speculation that the UC Berkeley group would prevail in Europe. Doudna has co-founded Caribou, a company to commercialize CRISPR technology. She is also a cofounder of Scribe Therapeutics which pioneered CasX, a more compact, next-generation Cas9 which can efficiently cut DNA.
In addition to the CRISPR breakthrough, Doudna has discovered that the hepatitis C virus utilizes an unusual strategy to synthesize viral proteins. This work could lead to new drugs to stop infections without causing harm to the tissues of the body.
Doudna was a Searle Scholar and received the 1996 Beckman Young Investigators Award. In 2000, she was awarded the Alan T. Waterman Award, the National Science Foundation's highest honor that annually recognizes an outstanding researcher under the age of 35, for her structure determination of a ribozyme. In 2001, she received the Eli Lilly Award in Biological Chemistry of the American Chemical Society.
In 2015, together with Emmanuelle Charpentier, she received the Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences for her contributions to CRISPR/Cas9 genome editing technology. In 2016, together with Charpentier, Feng Zhang, Philippe Horvath and Rodolphe Barrangou, she received the Canada Gairdner International Award. Also in 2016, she received the Heineken Prize for Biochemistry and Biophysics. She has also been a co-recipient of the Gruber Prize in Genetics (2015), the Tang Prize (2016), the Japan Prize (2017) and the Albany Medical Center Prize (2017). In 2018, Doudna was awarded the NAS Award in Chemical Sciences, the Pearl Meister Greengard Prize from the Rockefeller University, and a Medal of Honor from the American Cancer Society. In 2019 she received the Harvey Prize of the Technion/Israel for the year 2018 (jointly with Emmanuelle Charpentier and Feng Zhang) and in 2020 the Wolf Prize in Medicine (jointly with Emmanuelle Charpentier).
She was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2002, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2003, the National Academy of Medicine in 2010 and the National Academy of Inventors in 2014. She was elected a Foreign Member of the Royal Society (ForMemRS) in 2016. In 2017, Doudna was awarded the Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement. In 2019, Doudna was a recipient of the LUI Che Woo Prize in the category of Welfare Betterment. In 2020, she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship.
Early life and education
Early years
Jennifer Doudna was born February 19, 1964 in Washington, D.C. Her father received his Ph.D. in English literature from the University of Michigan, and her mother, a stay-at-home parent, held a master's degree in education. When Doudna was seven years old, the family moved to Hawaii because her father accepted a position in American literature at the University of Hawaii at Hilo. Jennifer Doudna's mother earned a second master's degree in Asian history from the university and taught history at a local community college.Growing up in Hilo, Hawaii, Doudna was fascinated by the environmental beauty of the island and its exotic plants and animals. They built her sense of curiosity about how nature works and she wanted to understand the underlying biological mechanisms. When she was in school, she developed her interest in science and mathematics. Her father fostered a culture of intellectual pursuit in her home. He enjoyed reading about science and filled the home with plenty of books on popular science. When she was in the sixth grade, her father gave her a copy of The Double Helix (a book by James Watson). When she was in high school, she was influenced by Miss Wong, a chemistry teacher.
University education and post-doctoral years
Doudna entered Pomona College in Claremont, California to study biochemistry. During her sophomore year, while taking a course in general chemistry, she questioned her own ability to pursue a career in science, and considered switching her major to French. However, her French teacher suggested she stick with science. Chemistry professors Fred Grieman and Corwin Hansch at Pomona had a major impact on her. She started her first scientific research in the lab of professor Sharon Panasenko. She earned her Bachelor of Arts degree in Biochemistry in 1985. She chose Harvard Medical School for her doctoral study and earned a Ph.D. in Biological Chemistry and Molecular Pharmacology in 1989. Her Ph.D. dissertation was on a system that increased the efficiency of a self-replicating catalytic RNA and was supervised by Jack W. Szostak. From 1989 to 1991, she held research fellowships in molecular biology at the Massachusetts General Hospital and in genetics at Harvard Medical School. From 1991 to 1994, she was Lucille P. Markey Postdoctoral Scholar in Biomedical Science at the University of Colorado Boulder, where she worked with Thomas Cech.Career and research
Research on ribozyme structure and function
Early in her scientific career, Doudna worked to uncover the structure and biological function of RNA enzymes or ribozymes. While in the Szostak lab, Doudna re-engineered the self-splicing Tetrahymena Group I catalytic intron into a true catalytic ribozyme that copied RNA templates. Her focus was on engineering ribozymes and understanding their underlying mechanisms; however, she came to realize that not being able to see the molecular mechanisms of ribozymes was a major problem. So she went to the lab of Thomas Cech at the University of Colorado Boulder to crystallize and determine the three-dimensional structure of a ribozyme for the first time, so ribozyme structure could be compared with that of enzymes, the catalytic proteins. She started this project in the Cech lab in 1991 and finished it at Yale University in 1996. She had joined Yale's Department of Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry as an assistant professor in 1994.X-ray diffraction-based structure of active site of a ribozyme at Yale
At Yale, Doudna's group was able to crystallize and solve the three-dimensional structure of the catalytic core of the Tetrahymena Group I ribozyme. Initially, her group was able to grow high-quality crystals, but they struggled with the phase problem due to unspecific binding of the metal ions. One of her early graduate students and later her husband, Jamie Cate decided to soak the crystals in the heavy metal derivative, osmium hexammine to imitate magnesium. Using this strategy, they were able to solve the structure, the first solved ribozyme structure and the second solved folded RNA structure (the first being tRNA). They found that the osmium hexammines mimicking the normal magnesium ions were in a cluster at the center of the ribozyme and served as a core for RNA folding. This interaction created a structure in the ribozyme catalytic center that was similar to that of an active site in the hydrophobic core of a protein. Her group has crystallized other ribozymes, including the Hepatitis Delta Virus ribozyme. This initial work to solve large RNA structures led to further structural studies on an internal ribosome entry site(IRES) and protein-RNA complexes such as the Signal Recognition Particle.Doudna was promoted to the position of Henry Ford II Professor of Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry at Yale in 2000. In 2000–2001, she was Robert Burns Woodward Visiting Professor of Chemistry at Harvard University.
Move to UC Berkeley
In 2002, she accepted a faculty position at the University of California, Berkeley as a Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, joining her husband Jamie Cate who was a professor there. She also gained access to the synchrotron at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory for her experiments with high powered x-ray diffraction. She is currently located at University of California, Berkeley where she directs the Innovative Genomics Institute, a joint UC Berkeley-University of California, San Francisco center, holds Li Ka Shing Chancellor's Professorship in Biomedicine and Health, and is the chair of the Chancellor's Advisor Committee on Biology. Her lab now focuses on obtaining a mechanistic understanding of biological processes involving RNA. This work is divided into three major areas, the CRISPR system, RNA interference, and translational control via MicroRNAs.CRISPR-Cas9 genome editing discovery
In 2012, Doudna and her colleagues made a new discovery that reduces the time and work needed to edit genomic DNA. Their discovery relies on a protein named Cas9 found in the Streptococcus bacterial "CRISPR" immune system that cooperates with guide RNA and works like scissors. The protein attacks its prey, the DNA of viruses, and slices it up, preventing it from infecting the bacterium. This system had been known but she and Charpentier showed for the first time that they could use different RNAs to program it to cut and edit different DNAs. In 2015, Doudna gave a TED Talk about the bioethics of using CRISPR. As CRISPR becomes increasingly used to edit multicellular organisms, Doudna continues to be called upon to speak clearly about the ethics of changing an organism's function using CRISPR. Their discovery has since been further developed by many research groups for applications ranging from fundamental cell biology, plant, and animal research to treatments for diseases including sickle cell anemia, cystic fibrosis, Huntington's disease, and HIV.The CRISPR system created a new straightforward way to edit DNA and there was a rush to patent the technique. Doudna and UC Berkeley collaborators applied for a patent and so did a group at the Broad Institute affiliated with MIT and Harvard. Zhang at the Broad Institute had shown that CRISPR-Cas9 could edit genes in cultured human cells a few months after Doudna and Charpentier published their method. Before the UC Berkeley patent application was decided, a patent was granted to the Broad investigators and UC Berkeley filed a lawsuit against the decision. In 2017, the court decided in favor of the Broad Institute, who claimed that they had initiated the research earliest and had first applied it to human cell engineering thus supporting editing in human cells with evidence but that the UC Berkeley group had only suggested this application. UC Berkeley appealed on grounds that they had clearly discussed and spelled out how to do the application the Broad had pursued. In September 2018, the appeals court decided in favor of the Broad Institute's patent. Meanwhile, UC Berkeley and co-applicants' patent to cover the general technique was also granted. To further cloud the issue, in Europe the claim of the Broad Institute, to have initiated the research first, was disallowed. The rejection was due to a procedural flaw in the application involving a different set of personnel listed in the lawsuit and the patent application, leading to speculation that the UC Berkeley group would prevail in Europe. Doudna has co-founded Caribou, a company to commercialize CRISPR technology. She is also a cofounder of Scribe Therapeutics which pioneered CasX, a more compact, next-generation Cas9 which can efficiently cut DNA.
In addition to the CRISPR breakthrough, Doudna has discovered that the hepatitis C virus utilizes an unusual strategy to synthesize viral proteins. This work could lead to new drugs to stop infections without causing harm to the tissues of the body.
Mammoth Biosciences
In 2017, Doudna co-founded Mammoth Biosciences, a San Francisco based bioengineering tech startup. Initial funding raised $23 million with a series B round of funding in 2020 raising $45 million. The business is focused on improving access to bio sensing tests which address "challenges across healthcare, agriculture, environmental monitoring, biodefense, and more.COVID-19 Response
As executive director of the Innovative Genomics Institute (IGI) at UC Berkeley, Jennifer Doudna is leading a COVID-19 testing center. This center processes more than 1000 patient samples per day. Mammoth Biosciences announced a peer-reviewed validation of a rapid, CRISPR-based COVID-19 diagnostic which is faster and less expensive than qRT-PCR based tests.Personal life
As a postdoctoral student at the University of Colorado Doudna met Jamie Cate, then a graduate student; they worked together on the project to crystallize and determine the structure of the Tetrahymena Group I intron P4-P6 catalytic region. They married when she was teaching at Yale, and they both accepted faculty positions at UC Berkeley and moved there. He is currently a UC Berkeley professor and works on gene-editing yeast to increase their cellulose fermentation for biofuel production. Their son (born 2003) "likes computers and math.Awards and honors
Main article: List of awards and honors received by Jennifer DoudnaDoudna was a Searle Scholar and received the 1996 Beckman Young Investigators Award. In 2000, she was awarded the Alan T. Waterman Award, the National Science Foundation's highest honor that annually recognizes an outstanding researcher under the age of 35, for her structure determination of a ribozyme. In 2001, she received the Eli Lilly Award in Biological Chemistry of the American Chemical Society.
In 2015, together with Emmanuelle Charpentier, she received the Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences for her contributions to CRISPR/Cas9 genome editing technology. In 2016, together with Charpentier, Feng Zhang, Philippe Horvath and Rodolphe Barrangou, she received the Canada Gairdner International Award. Also in 2016, she received the Heineken Prize for Biochemistry and Biophysics. She has also been a co-recipient of the Gruber Prize in Genetics (2015), the Tang Prize (2016), the Japan Prize (2017) and the Albany Medical Center Prize (2017). In 2018, Doudna was awarded the NAS Award in Chemical Sciences, the Pearl Meister Greengard Prize from the Rockefeller University, and a Medal of Honor from the American Cancer Society. In 2019 she received the Harvey Prize of the Technion/Israel for the year 2018 (jointly with Emmanuelle Charpentier and Feng Zhang) and in 2020 the Wolf Prize in Medicine (jointly with Emmanuelle Charpentier).
She was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2002, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2003, the National Academy of Medicine in 2010 and the National Academy of Inventors in 2014. She was elected a Foreign Member of the Royal Society (ForMemRS) in 2016. In 2017, Doudna was awarded the Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement. In 2019, Doudna was a recipient of the LUI Che Woo Prize in the category of Welfare Betterment. In 2020, she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship.
Norman Robert Foster was born in 1935 in Reddish, two miles north of Stockport, then a part of Cheshire. The only child of Robert and Lilian Foster (née Smith), the family moved to Levenshulme, near Manchester, where they lived in poverty. His father was a machine painter at the Metropolitan-Vickers works in Trafford Park which influenced him to take up engineering, design, and to pursue a career designing buildings. His mother worked in a local bakery. Foster's parents were diligent and hard workers who often had neighbours and family members look after their son, which Foster later believed restricted his relationship with his mother and father.
Foster attended Burnage Grammar School for Boys in Burnage, where he was bullied by fellow pupils and took up reading. He considered himself quiet and awkward in his early years.At 16, he left school and passed an entrance exam for a trainee scheme set up by Manchester Town Hall, which led to his first job, an office junior and clerk in the treasurer's department. In 1953, Foster completed his national service in the Royal Air Force, choosing the air force because aircraft had been a longtime hobby.
Upon returning to Manchester, Foster went against his parents' wishes and sought employment elsewhere. He had seven O-Levels by this time, and applied to work at a duplicating machine company, telling the interviewer he had applied for the prospect of a company car and a £1,000 salary. Instead, he became an assistant to a contract manager at a local architects, John E. Beardshaw and Partners. The staff advised him, that if he wished to become an architect, he should prepare a portfolio of drawings using the perspective and shop drawings from Beardshaw's practice as an example. Beardshaw was so impressed with Foster's drawings that he promoted him to the drawing department.
In 1956, Foster began study at the School of Architecture and City Planning, part of the University of Manchester. He was ineligible for a maintenance grant, so he took part-time jobs to fund his studies, including an ice-cream salesman, bouncer, and night shifts at a bakery making crumpets. During this time, he also studied at the local library in Levenshulme. His talent and hard work was recognised in 1959 when he won £100 and a RIBA silver medal for what he described as "a measured drawing of a windmill". After graduating in 1961, Foster won the Henry Fellowship to Yale School of Architecture in New Haven, Connecticut, where he met future business partner Richard Rogers and earned his master's degree. At the suggestion of Vincent Scully, the pair travelled across America for a year.
Foster Associates concentrated on industrial buildings until 1969, when the practice worked on the administrative and leisure centre for Fred. Olsen Lines based in the London Docklands, which integrated workers and managers within the same office space. Its breakthrough building in England followed in 1974 with the completion of the Willis Faber & Dumas headquarters in Ipswich. The client was a family run insurance company that wanted to restore a sense of community to the workplace. Foster created open plan office floors, long before open-plan became the norm, and placed a roof garden, 25-metre swimming pool, and gymnasium in the building to enhance the quality of life for the company's 1,200 employees. The building has a full-height glass façade moulded to the medieval street plan and contributes drama, subtly shifting from opaque, reflective black to a glowing back-lit transparency as the sun sets. The design was inspired by the Daily Express Building in Manchester that Foster had admired as a youngster. The building is now Grade I* listed.
The Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, an art gallery and museum on the campus of the University of East Anglia, Norwich, was one of the first major public buildings to be designed by Foster, completed in 1978, and became grade II* listed in December 2012. In 1990 Foster's design for the Terminal Building at London Stansted Airport was awarded the European Union Prize for Contemporary Architecture / Mies van der Rohe Award.
Foster gained a reputation for designing office buildings. In the 1980s he designed the HSBC Main Building in Hong Kong for HSBC. The building is marked by its high level of light transparency, as all 3500 workers have a view to Victoria Peak or Victoria Harbour. Foster said that if the firm had not won the contract it would probably have been bankrupted.
Foster believes that attracting young talent is essential, and is proud that the average age of people working for Foster and Partners is 32, just like it was in 1967.
Foster's earlier designs reflected a sophisticated, machine-influenced high-tech vision. His style has evolved into a more sharp-edged modernity. In 2004, Foster designed the tallest bridge in the world, the Millau Viaduct in Southern France, with the Millau Mayor Jacques Godfrain stating; "The architect, Norman Foster, gave us a model of art.
Foster worked with Steve Jobs from about 2009 until Jobs' death to design the Apple offices, Apple Campus 2 now called Apple Park, in Cupertino, California, US. Apple's board and staff continued to work with Foster as the design was completed and the construction in progress. The circular building was opened to employees in April 2017, six years after Jobs died in 2011.
In January 2007, the Sunday Times reported that Foster had called in Catalyst, a corporate finance house, to find buyers for Foster + Partners. Foster does not intend to retire, but sell his 80–90% holding in the company valued at £300 million to £500 million.
In 2007, he worked with Philippe Starck and Sir Richard Branson of the Virgin Group for the Virgin Galactic plans.
Foster currently sits on the Board of Trustees at architectural charity Article 25 who design, construct and manage innovative, safe, sustainable buildings in some of the most inhospitable and unstable regions of the world. He has also been on the Board of Trustees of the Architecture Foundation.
In 2012, Foster was among the British cultural figures selected by artist Sir Peter Blake to appear in a new version of his most famous artwork – the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band album cover – to celebrate the British cultural figures of his life that he most admires.
In the 2000s, Foster was diagnosed with bowel cancer and was told he had weeks to live. He received chemotherapy treatment and made a full recovery. He also suffered from a heart attack.
Foster was elected an Associate of the Royal Academy (ARA) on 19 May 1983, and a Royal Academician (RA) on 26 June 1991. In 1995, he was elected an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering (HonFREng). On 24 April 2017, he was given the Freedom of the City of London. The Bloomberg London building received a Stirling Prize in October 2018.
He was awarded the Aga Khan Award for Architecture, for the University of Technology Petronas in Malaysia, and in 2008 he was granted an honorary degree from the Dundee School of Architecture at the University of Dundee. In 2009 he received the Prince of Asturias Award in the category Arts.
Foster attended Burnage Grammar School for Boys in Burnage, where he was bullied by fellow pupils and took up reading. He considered himself quiet and awkward in his early years.At 16, he left school and passed an entrance exam for a trainee scheme set up by Manchester Town Hall, which led to his first job, an office junior and clerk in the treasurer's department. In 1953, Foster completed his national service in the Royal Air Force, choosing the air force because aircraft had been a longtime hobby.
Upon returning to Manchester, Foster went against his parents' wishes and sought employment elsewhere. He had seven O-Levels by this time, and applied to work at a duplicating machine company, telling the interviewer he had applied for the prospect of a company car and a £1,000 salary. Instead, he became an assistant to a contract manager at a local architects, John E. Beardshaw and Partners. The staff advised him, that if he wished to become an architect, he should prepare a portfolio of drawings using the perspective and shop drawings from Beardshaw's practice as an example. Beardshaw was so impressed with Foster's drawings that he promoted him to the drawing department.
In 1956, Foster began study at the School of Architecture and City Planning, part of the University of Manchester. He was ineligible for a maintenance grant, so he took part-time jobs to fund his studies, including an ice-cream salesman, bouncer, and night shifts at a bakery making crumpets. During this time, he also studied at the local library in Levenshulme. His talent and hard work was recognised in 1959 when he won £100 and a RIBA silver medal for what he described as "a measured drawing of a windmill". After graduating in 1961, Foster won the Henry Fellowship to Yale School of Architecture in New Haven, Connecticut, where he met future business partner Richard Rogers and earned his master's degree. At the suggestion of Vincent Scully, the pair travelled across America for a year.
Career
In 1963, Foster returned to England and established his own an architectural practice, Team 4, with Rogers, Su Brumwell, and sisters Georgie and Wendy Cheesman. The team earned a reputation for their high-tech industrial designs. After the four separated in 1967, Foster and Wendy founded a new practice, Foster Associates. From 1968 to 1983, Foster collaborated with American architect Richard Buckminster Fuller on several projects that became catalysts in the development of an environmentally sensitive approach to design, such as the Samuel Beckett Theatre at St Peter's College, Oxford. In 1999, the company was renamed Foster + Partners.Foster Associates concentrated on industrial buildings until 1969, when the practice worked on the administrative and leisure centre for Fred. Olsen Lines based in the London Docklands, which integrated workers and managers within the same office space. Its breakthrough building in England followed in 1974 with the completion of the Willis Faber & Dumas headquarters in Ipswich. The client was a family run insurance company that wanted to restore a sense of community to the workplace. Foster created open plan office floors, long before open-plan became the norm, and placed a roof garden, 25-metre swimming pool, and gymnasium in the building to enhance the quality of life for the company's 1,200 employees. The building has a full-height glass façade moulded to the medieval street plan and contributes drama, subtly shifting from opaque, reflective black to a glowing back-lit transparency as the sun sets. The design was inspired by the Daily Express Building in Manchester that Foster had admired as a youngster. The building is now Grade I* listed.
The Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, an art gallery and museum on the campus of the University of East Anglia, Norwich, was one of the first major public buildings to be designed by Foster, completed in 1978, and became grade II* listed in December 2012. In 1990 Foster's design for the Terminal Building at London Stansted Airport was awarded the European Union Prize for Contemporary Architecture / Mies van der Rohe Award.
Foster gained a reputation for designing office buildings. In the 1980s he designed the HSBC Main Building in Hong Kong for HSBC. The building is marked by its high level of light transparency, as all 3500 workers have a view to Victoria Peak or Victoria Harbour. Foster said that if the firm had not won the contract it would probably have been bankrupted.
Foster believes that attracting young talent is essential, and is proud that the average age of people working for Foster and Partners is 32, just like it was in 1967.
Present day
Foster was assigned the brief for a development on the site of the Baltic Exchange in the 1990s. The Exchange was damaged beyond repair by a bomb left by the IRA. Foster + Partners submitted a plan for a 385-metre tall skyscraper, the London Millennium Tower, but its height was seen as excessive for London's skyline. The proposal was scrapped and instead Foster proposed 30 St Mary Axe, popularly referred to as "the gherkin", after its shape. Foster worked with engineers to integrate complex computer systems with the most basic physical laws, such as convection.Foster's earlier designs reflected a sophisticated, machine-influenced high-tech vision. His style has evolved into a more sharp-edged modernity. In 2004, Foster designed the tallest bridge in the world, the Millau Viaduct in Southern France, with the Millau Mayor Jacques Godfrain stating; "The architect, Norman Foster, gave us a model of art.
Foster worked with Steve Jobs from about 2009 until Jobs' death to design the Apple offices, Apple Campus 2 now called Apple Park, in Cupertino, California, US. Apple's board and staff continued to work with Foster as the design was completed and the construction in progress. The circular building was opened to employees in April 2017, six years after Jobs died in 2011.
In January 2007, the Sunday Times reported that Foster had called in Catalyst, a corporate finance house, to find buyers for Foster + Partners. Foster does not intend to retire, but sell his 80–90% holding in the company valued at £300 million to £500 million.
In 2007, he worked with Philippe Starck and Sir Richard Branson of the Virgin Group for the Virgin Galactic plans.
Foster currently sits on the Board of Trustees at architectural charity Article 25 who design, construct and manage innovative, safe, sustainable buildings in some of the most inhospitable and unstable regions of the world. He has also been on the Board of Trustees of the Architecture Foundation.
In 2012, Foster was among the British cultural figures selected by artist Sir Peter Blake to appear in a new version of his most famous artwork – the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band album cover – to celebrate the British cultural figures of his life that he most admires.
Personal life
Foster has been married three times. His first wife, Wendy Cheeseman, one of the four founders of Team 4, died from cancer in 1989. From 1991 to 1995, he was married to Begum Sabiha Rumani Malik. The marriage ended in divorce. In 1996, Foster married Spanish psychologist and art curator Elena Ochoa. He has five children; two of the four sons he had with Cheeseman are adopted.In the 2000s, Foster was diagnosed with bowel cancer and was told he had weeks to live. He received chemotherapy treatment and made a full recovery. He also suffered from a heart attack.
Honours
Foster was made a Knight Bachelor in the 1990 Birthday Honours, and thereby granted the title sir. He was appointed to the Order of Merit (OM) in 1997. In the 1999 Birthday Honours, Foster's elevation to the peerage was announced in June 1999 and was raised to the peerage as Baron Foster of Thames Bank, of Reddish in the County of Greater Manchester in July.Foster was elected an Associate of the Royal Academy (ARA) on 19 May 1983, and a Royal Academician (RA) on 26 June 1991. In 1995, he was elected an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering (HonFREng). On 24 April 2017, he was given the Freedom of the City of London. The Bloomberg London building received a Stirling Prize in October 2018.
Recognition
Foster received The Lynn S. Beedle Lifetime Achievement Award from the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat in 2007 to honour his contributions to the advancement of tall buildings.He was awarded the Aga Khan Award for Architecture, for the University of Technology Petronas in Malaysia, and in 2008 he was granted an honorary degree from the Dundee School of Architecture at the University of Dundee. In 2009 he received the Prince of Asturias Award in the category Arts.
Nina Marie Tandon is an American biomedical engineer. She is the CEO and co-founder of EpiBone. She currently serves as an adjunct professor of Electrical Engineering at Cooper Union and is a senior fellow at the Lab for Stem Cells and Tissue Engineering at Columbia. She was a 2011 TED Fellow and a 2012 senior TED Fellow.
Tandon grew up on Roosevelt Island in New York City. She had one brother and two sisters. As a child, Tandon discovered an interest in science when she discovered her siblings suffered from eye conditions. She and her siblings were each encouraged to try various science experiments; Tandon's siblings also pursued careers in scientific fields. As a child, she enjoyed "taking apart TVs and building these giant Tinkertoy towers, playing with static electricity, and experimenting on [her] class for science fairs." She participated in puzzles and problem-solving, community theatre, poetry, and sewing.
She later co-founded EpiBone, and currently serves as the company's CEO.
Aside from her scientific research, Tandon has many other hobbies and interests such as metalworking, running marathons, and yoga. She started her career when she was hired by a telecommunications company, where she ended up doing customer service. Tandon worked at Avaya Labs, developing communications software before specializing in biomedical engineering. Her medical career was inspired by her siblings; her brother has an eye disease and struggles to see clearly, and both of her sisters have issues with seeing colors, thus changing our perceptions of the outside world. Her career was also inspired by her mother, who encouraged science from a very young age.
Tandon is also a TED Senior fellow, speaking there several times. She is an Adjunct Professor of Electrical Engineering at Copper Union and previously, she worked as an Associate Postdoctoral Researcher for Stem Cells and Tissue Engineering Laboratory at Columbia University, where she attended school as well.
Tandon grew up on Roosevelt Island in New York City. She had one brother and two sisters. As a child, Tandon discovered an interest in science when she discovered her siblings suffered from eye conditions. She and her siblings were each encouraged to try various science experiments; Tandon's siblings also pursued careers in scientific fields. As a child, she enjoyed "taking apart TVs and building these giant Tinkertoy towers, playing with static electricity, and experimenting on [her] class for science fairs." She participated in puzzles and problem-solving, community theatre, poetry, and sewing.
Personal life
In addition to English, Nina Tandon has studied French and Hindi and is able to speak Italian. She has participated in marathons. In 2010, she co-taught a science camp in Lynn, Massachusetts for underprivileged children. She also enjoys metal-smithing and being a yoga instructor.Education
Tandon attended college at Cooper Union, graduating with a Bachelor of Electrical Engineering in 2001. While completing her undergraduate education, she built an electronic musical instrument which is played through human bodies' electromagnetic waves. From 2003 to 2004, Tandon attended University of Rome Tor Vergata, having received a Fulbright scholarship. There, she worked on the development of LibraNose, analyzing "patient breath samples to determine the feasibility of a noninvasive cancer-smelling device." In 2006, she graduated from MIT with a MS in Electrical Engineering, having received a MIT Presidential Fellowship in 2004. In 2006, she started graduate work at the Boston School, she quickly changed to follow her mentor, Professor Gordana Vunjak- Novakovice. She then studied at Columbia University, graduating in 2009 with a PhD in Biomedical Engineering, with a concentration in Cardiac Tissue Engineering. Tandon stated that her career path was inspired by relatives and was a process. At Columbia, she began creating human tissues. She also received an MBA from Columbia in 2012. She said that she wanted to bridge the gap between the possibilities of her research, and actually making them happen, and this is made possible with a business degree.Career
As a biomedical engineer, Tandon worked at Columbia University to force growth and stimulation of cells, using electrical currents. Currently, she has grown cells on rat hearts, to beat, but her ultimate goal is to have the ability to create a process where scientists can grow entire human organs.She later co-founded EpiBone, and currently serves as the company's CEO.
Aside from her scientific research, Tandon has many other hobbies and interests such as metalworking, running marathons, and yoga. She started her career when she was hired by a telecommunications company, where she ended up doing customer service. Tandon worked at Avaya Labs, developing communications software before specializing in biomedical engineering. Her medical career was inspired by her siblings; her brother has an eye disease and struggles to see clearly, and both of her sisters have issues with seeing colors, thus changing our perceptions of the outside world. Her career was also inspired by her mother, who encouraged science from a very young age.
Tandon is also a TED Senior fellow, speaking there several times. She is an Adjunct Professor of Electrical Engineering at Copper Union and previously, she worked as an Associate Postdoctoral Researcher for Stem Cells and Tissue Engineering Laboratory at Columbia University, where she attended school as well.
Honors and awards
In 2011, she was named a TED Fellow. The following year, she was named a senior TED Fellow and one of Fast Company's Most Creative People of 2012. Tandon was a recipient of Marie Claire's Women on Top Awards in 2013. She was also named a Wired innovation fellow and a 2015 Global Thinker by Foreign Policy. L'Oréal Paris named her as one of its Women of Worth in the science and innovation category and Crains New York named her as part of its 40 Under 40 Class of 2015. She also has three patents.HOW TO NOMINATE
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