Brian Tinsley

Who is Brian Tinsley?

Brian Tinsley is a physicist who for more than 50 years has been actively researching Aeronomy. 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 optical emissions from the upper atmosphere. 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. Beatrice obtained a Ph. D. in astrophysics at the University of Texas at Austin, and became a prominent astrophysicist before she died in 1981, resulting in the University of Texas at Austin creating the endowed professorship that bears her name.

During his time at the NSF in the late 1980s he began researching the effects of changes in the sun on weather, climate change, and global warming on the decadal and century timescale. He has been author of more than 40 papers. He has proposed a mechanism in which the link to the atmosphere is the solar wind.