Bjarni Tryggvason

He was once married to Lilyanna Zmijak, but the couple split up later on. He has two children, a son, Michael Kristjan, and a daughter, Lauren Stephanie Chironne.

He was born on 21 September 1945 in Reykjavík, Iceland. He received his primary education from schools in Nova Scotia and British Columbia.

He attended high school in Richmond, British Columbia and enrolled at the University of British Columbia for his higher studies. He received his Bachelor of Applied Science in Engineering Physics in 1972.

Later on he completed postgraduate work in engineering with specialization in applied mathematics and fluid dynamics at the University of Western Ontario.

In 1972, he was appointed as a meteorologist with the cloud physics group at the Atmospheric Environment Service in Toronto where he worked till 1973.

He joined the University of Western Ontario as a research associate at the Boundary Layer Wind Tunnel Laboratory in 1974. There he worked on projects involving rigid and aero-elastic model studies of wind effects on structures.

During this time he also started teaching as a guest research associate, first at the Kyoto University, Japan, in 1978, followed by James Cook University in Townsville, Australia.

He returned to the University of Western Ontario as a lecturer in applied mathematics in 1979 and held this position till 1982. After leaving this teaching position he accepted an offer to join the Low Speed Aerodynamics Laboratory at the National Research Council (NRC) as a Research Officer.

In 1981, he started teaching graduate courses on structural dynamics and random vibrations as a part-time lecturer at the University of Ottawa and Carleton University.

He was part of the NRC team assembled to study the sinking of the Ocean Ranger oil rig. He designed and led the aerodynamics tests, which established the wind loads acting on the rig.

In 1997, he served as a Payload Specialist on STS-85, a 12-day mission to study changes in the Earth’s atmosphere.