Bill Nye

With his distinctive bow-ties, Bill Nye is one of the most recognisable science communicators in America, if not the world. He is best known for his hit kid’s show, Bill Nye the Science Guy, which ran for six seasons during the 1990s and won an amazing 19 Emmy Awards. A sequel aimed at adults, Bill Nye Saves the World, ran on Netflix for two seasons from 2017. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Nye is massively popular on social media. He has 2.9 million Instagram followers, 100,000 YouTube subscribers, and an incredible 6 million followers on Twitter. In August 2022, he launched a new TV series, The End is Nye.

Nye graduated as an engineer and worked for Boeing, but he also developed a parallel career in stand-up comedy, and quit his engineering career for the world of entertainment in the mid-1980s. He inadvertently got his big break whilst working on a Seattle show called Almost Live. When a guest cancelled, Nye did some of his “science stuff” to fill the gap, and soon afterwards, his “Bill Nye the Science Guy” persona was born.

A show of that name was launched in 1993 and ran for the rest of the decade, becoming a must-watch show for young millennials and winning a great many Dayime Emmy Awards. The show cemented Nye’s reputation as a cultural icon and science communicator, giving him the status that he has maintained ever since. He is still a regular presence on people’s feeds, explaining science and advocating everything from vaccine uptake to climate action.