Tierney obtained his B.A. from Brown University in 1959 and his Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1965. His dissertation, On the classifying spaces for K-Theory mod p, was written under the supervision of Samuel Eilenberg. Following positions at Rice University (1965–66) and ETH Zurich (1966–68), he became an associate professor at Rutgers in 1968.
André Joyal, Myles Tierney, Quasi-categories vs Segal spaces, Categories in algebra, geometry and mathematical physics, 277—326, Contemporary Mathematics 431, American Mathematical Society, Providence, RI, 2007.