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Neil deGrasse Tyson will be a featured speaker at the ISE Summit 2010, coming up March 3-5 in Washington, D.C. On-screen host of NOVA scienceNOW, the NSF-supported spin-off of WGBH's long-running NOVA series, Dr. Tyson is an astrophysicist and director of the American Museum of Natural History's Hayden Planetarium.

Dr. Tyson's professional research interests are broad, including star formation, exploding stars, dwarf galaxies, and the structure of the Milky Way. A member of the NASA Advisory Council, Dr. Tyson is author of Death by Black Hole and Other Cosmic Quandaries, The Pluto Files: The Rise and Fall of America's Favorite Planet, and dozens of professional publications and essays for Natural History magazine. He was on-camera host of the 2004 PBS-NOVA series Origins and coauthored the companion book, Origins: Fourteen Billion Years of Cosmic Evolution. Recent endeavors include the NSF-funded pilot radio series StarTalk, "the first and only popular commercial radio program devoted to all things space," which he cohosted with standup comedienne Lynn Koplitz.

Born and raised in New York City, where he graduated from the Bronx High School of Science, Dr. Tyson eventually went on to earn a Ph.D. in astrophysics from Columbia University. He writes about his personal journey in The Sky is Not the Limit: Adventures of an Urban Astrophysicist.

Image: Neil deGrasse Tyson, host of WGBH's NOVA scienceNOW, examines an unpolished man-made diamond, fresh out of the grower, while Apollo Diamond's Robert Linares looks on. Credit: WGBH