Toby Hendy

Toby Hendy, known online as Tibees, is a New Zealand science communicator and YouTuber based in Australia. She specializes in creating educational content focused on physics, mathematics, and astronomy.

Hendy attended Katikati College in the Bay of Plenty, New Zealand. In 2011, the Royal Society of New Zealand selected her as a national delegate to attend the USA International Space Camp in Huntsville, Alabama. She won first place in the secondary school category of the NZ Eureka Awards for Science Communication in 2012. She earned a Bachelor of Science majoring in Physics and Mathematics at the University of Canterbury, receiving an Aurora Astronomy Scholarship that funded visits to multiple observatories and research centers, including NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Caltech. She was also awarded the Haydon Prize as the top graduating physics student in 2015.

Hendy completed her Honours year at the Australian National University (ANU) in Canberra, graduating with first class honours for her thesis on the mechanical response of Arabidopsis thaliana using nanoindentation and Finite Element Modelling. In 2017, she began PhD studies at ANU funded by a Westpac Future Leader's Scholarship. During her doctoral studies, she placed as the runner-up in the Australian national finals of the FameLab competition. In 2018, Hendy left her PhD program to focus on her YouTube career full-time.

Having uploaded videos to YouTube since high school, Hendy announced in August 2020 that she was creating a mathematical stop-motion short film titled Finding X. Supported by the Screen Australia Skip Ahead initiative, the film was released in January 2022. She also appeared on several seasons of the travel competition show Jet Lag: The Game, participating in season 5 in New Zealand, season 10 in Australia, and season 15 in Western Europe.

In May 2025, Hendy announced her book A Guide To Making Friends in the Fourth Dimension, which was published in November 2025 and awarded a Sloan Science prize. In May 2026, she announced a co-authored science fiction novel titled Alpha Creek, written with Len Vlahos. Her recognitions include a 2024 nomination for Young Australian of the Year for Queensland, and in 2025, the International Astronomical Union's Minor Planet Center named asteroid 22955 "Tibees" in recognition of her science communication outreach.