Ferris Biography

Timothy Ferris is the author of Coming of Age in the Milky Way, The Mind's Sky, Galaxies, The Red Limit, and other best-selling books on astronomy, physics, and the history and philosophy of science. He has been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. A Guggenheim Fellow, he has twice received the science writing medals of the American Institute of Physics and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. His books have been translated into sixteen languages. A former editor for Rolling Stone, he has written for Harper's, The New Yorker, The Nation, Nature, Reader's Digest, The New Republic, The New York 'Times, and other periodicals.

Ferris produced the Voyager phonograph record, an artifact of human civilization containing music, sounds of Earth, and encoded photographs launched aboard the Voyager interstellar spacecraft in 1976. Ferris also wrote and narrated the award-winning PBS special "The Creation of the Universe." He has served as an essayist for PBS and a commentator for National Public Radio. He has taught five disciplines at four universities, and is currently emeritus professor at the University of California, Berkeley.

On moonless nights, Professor Ferris searches for extragalactic supernovae from Rocky Hill Observatory, which he designed and built, in Sonoma County, California.

He lives in Decatur, Alabama.