Derek Muller

Derek Alexander Muller (born 9 November 1982) science communicator and media personality best known for his YouTube channel Veritasium, which has over 21 million subscribers and 4.5 billion views as of September 2026. In 2004, Muller graduated from Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario, with a Bachelor of Applied Science in Engineering Physics.

Muller moved to Australia to study film-making; however, he instead enrolled for a PhD in physics education research from the University of Sydney, which he completed in 2008 with the thesis, Designing Effective Multimedia for Physics Education.

Career Muller has been listed as a team member of the ABC television program Catalyst since 2008. During his PhD program, he taught at a tutoring company, where he became the full-time Science Head after completing his PhD in 2008. He quit the job at the end of 2010. or hiking, discussing general topics with a scientific and educational perspective.

Since 2011, Muller has continued to appear on Catalyst, reporting scientific stories from around the globe, and on Australian television network Ten as the 'Why Guy' on the Breakfast program. In May 2012, he gave a TEDxSydney talk using the subject of his thesis. He presented the documentary Uranium – Twisting the Dragon's Tail, which aired in July–August 2015 on several public television stations around the world and won the Eureka Prize for Science Journalism.

On 21 September 2015, Muller hosted the Google Science Fair Awards Celebration for that year. Muller has also won the Australian Department of Innovation Nanotechnology Film Competition and the 2013 Australian Webstream Award for "Best Educational & Lifestyle Series". Starting in April 2017, he appeared as a correspondent on the Netflix series Bill Nye Saves the World.

Muller presented in the film Vitamania: The Sense and Nonsense of Vitamins, a documentary by Genepool Productions, released in August 2018. The film answers questions about vitamins and the use of dietary vitamin supplements. Muller's works have been featured in Scientific American, Wired, Gizmodo, and i09.

Veritasium and other YouTube channels

In January 2011, Muller created the educational science channel Veritasium on YouTube, the focus of which is "addressing counter-intuitive concepts in science, usually beginning by discussing ideas with members of the public". The videos range in style from interviews with experts, such as 2011 Physics Nobel Laureate Brian Schmidt, to science experiments, dramatisations, songs, anda hallmark of the channelinterviews with the public to uncover misconceptions about science. The name Veritasium is a combination of the Latin word for truth, Veritas, and the suffix common to many chemical elements, -ium. This creates Veritasium, an "element of truth", a play on the popular phrase. In its logo, which has been a registered trade mark since 2016, the number "42.0" resembles an element on the periodic table. The number was chosen because it is "the Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything" in Douglas Adams's famous novel The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. In 2017, Muller began uploading videos on his newest channel, Sciencium, which is dedicated to videos on recent and historical discoveries in science. In 2021, Muller hosted Pindrop, a YouTube Original series exploring unusual places around the world, as seen from Google Earth. Only one episode exploring potash evaporation ponds in Utah was released before YouTube cancelled all original production in 2022. As of 21April2023, Veritasium is majority-owned by the private equity media company Electrify Video Partners.

Reception Veritasium videos have received critical acclaim.

Two early successful Veritasium videos demonstrate the physics of a falling Slinky toy.