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Neil Tyson
Neil Tyson realized that he wanted to study space science when he was a young boy looking up at the moon through a pair of binoculars. His interest in science was not supported by his community, however; in Neil's New York City neighborhood, African-American boys were expected to be athletes, not scholars. In the streets of New York City, "being smart is not on the list of things that gets you respect," he recalls. Neil played sports with his friends, while also pursuing his interest in science. When he was thirteen, Neil went to summer astronomy camp in the Mohave Desert, where the sky was clear and he could see millions of stars. At the Bronx High School of Science, he focused his studies on astrophysics.At Harvard University, Neil majored in physics, rowed on the crew team, and joined the wrestling team. He earned a master's degree from the University of Texas at Austin, and then went home to New York to do his doctoral work at Columbia.
Neil's work focuses primarily on two areas, dwarf galaxies (which are less than one-tenth the size of our "normal" Milky Way galaxy) and the "bulge" at the center of the Milky Way. To conduct his research, Neil has used telescopes all over the world, including the Cerro Tololo InterAmerican Observatory, shown in the BreakThrough program.
Today, Neil has a full and varied life. He is married, collects fine wines, continues to wrestle, and to study the stars. He shares his knowledge about the universe in many ways: as an astrophysicist and research scientist at Princeton University, as a columnist for Stardate magazine, and as the acting director of the American Museum of Natural History-Hayden Planetarium. To help non-scientists understand the universe, Neil has published two books and is writing two more. On his role as an African-American scientist, he says that more is expected of him because of his race. "There's an extra social tax I have to pay," he says. "It's not a burden, I just pay the tax."
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