Brent Tully grew up in Vancouver, Canada, receiving his undergraduate degree from the University of British Columbia and a doctorate in astronomy from the University of Maryland. He spent two postdoctoral years at Marseille Observatory, France, before joining the faculty at the University of Hawaii where he has remained for 44 years.

Cosmography was hardly a field when, with Richard Fisher in the 1970’s, the pair appreciated that huge numbers of dwarf galaxies with large Hydrogen gas reservoirs could be detected with emergent radio telescope. Over four decades, Tully has maintained research involving the mapping of galaxy positions and motions. The effort has evolved into the Cosmicflows program of successively larger and more precise releases of galaxy distances, deviations from cosmic expansion, and implied structure in the distribution of (mostly dark) matter.  This research has been recognized by several awards, most notably the Viktor Ambartsumian International Science Prize and the Gruber Cosmology Prize.