Brian Tinsley is a physicist who for more than 60 years has been actively researching . He has been a professor of physics at the University of Texas at Dallas since 1976 and has served many national and international scientific organizations. He obtained his PhD from the University of Canterbury in New Zealand in November, 1963, for research on from the upper atmosphere (airglow and aurorae). With his wife, Beatrice Tinsley, he came to Dallas to work at the newly formed Southwest Center for Advanced Studies, which became the University of Texas at Dallas in 1969. They divorced in 1978, their adopted children Alan and Theresa remaining with him.