J. Anthony Tyson

John Anthony Tyson (aka J. Anthony Tyson or Tony Tyson; born 5 April 1940, Pasadena) is an American physicist and astronomer.

Tyson received in 1962 his bachelor's degree from Stanford University and in 1967 his Ph. D. from the University of Wisconsin. He was a postdoc from 1967 to 1969 at the University of Chicago. He was then a member of the technical staff at AT&T Bell Laboratories from 1969 to 1985. In 1985 he became a distinguished member of the technical staff (a position for experienced scientists and engineers in major U. S. companies) at Bell Laboratories until 2004. Since 2004 he has been a professor at the University of California, Davis.

In the late 1970s he applied CCDs to astronomy, discovering the faint blue galaxies. Using these distant galaxies he made the first maps of dark matter using weak gravitational lensing. Tyson built the Big Throughput Camera, which was used to discover dark energy. In the 1990s he started a project to build a next generation sky survey, and directed the project for 15 years. He is now the chief scientist for the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope.

His research interests are cosmology, dark matter, dark energy, observational optical astronomy, experimental gravitational physics, and new instruments.

Honors and awards

 * 1984: Elected Fellow, American Physical Society
 * 1985: IR 100 Award, Industrial Research
 * 1996: Aaronson Memorial Prize
 * 1997: Elected Fellow, American Academy of Arts and Sciences
 * 1997: Elected a Member of the National Academy of Sciences
 * 1998: Scott Lecturer, Cavendish Laboratory, Cambridge University
 * 1998: Hon. D.Sc., University of Chicago
 * 1999: APS Centennial Speaker
 * 2000: Elected a Member of the American Philosophical Society
 * 2022: Asteroid 179223 Tonytyson, discovered by astronomers with the Sloan Digital Sky Survey in 2001, was named in his honor. The official was published by IAU's WGSBN on 7 February 2022.