Tim Ferris
TIM FERRIS
Timothy Ferris is the author of ten books – among them the bestsellers The Whole Shebang and Coming of Age in the Milky Way, which have been translated into fifteen languages and were named by The New York Times as two of the leading books published in the twentieth century – and the editor of two major anthologies, Best American Science Writing 2001 and the World Treasury of Physics, Astronomy, and Mathematics. A former newspaper reporter and editor of Rolling Stone magazine, Ferris is a frequent contributor to The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books.
Ferris wrote and narrated two television specials – "The Creation of the Universe," which has aired in network prime time annually for 15 years, and “Life Beyond Earth,” which premiered on PBS November 10, 1999. He produced the Voyager phonograph record, an artifact of human civilization containing music, sounds of Earth and encoded photographs launched aboard the Voyager interstellar spacecraft, and was among the journalists selected as candidates to fly aboard the Space Shuttle in 1986. He is a consultant to NASA on the long-term goals of space exploration, and currently serves on the space agency’s Near-Earth Objects Steering Group.
Ferris has received the American Institute of Physics prize, the American Association for the Advancement of Science prize, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. His books have been nominated for the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. He has been called “the best popular science writer in the English language today” by The Christian Science Monitor, and “The best science writer of his generation” by The Washington Post. Professor Ferris, who has taught in five disciplines at four universities, is currently emeritus professor of journalism at the University of California, Berkeley.