USAFA Class Heritage

John is an entrepreneurial manager-scientist who had an original career goal to become a test pilot.  Raised in the south his parents were a chemist executive for DuPont Corp. and a South Carolina-teacher-of-the-year mother.  He was a high school football athlete and was accepted to the Academy in 1959 before entering the Georgia Tech aeronautical engineering program.  John's brother Stephen graduated from the Naval Academy and was a commissioned U.S. Marines helicopter pilot.

John was a member of the Academy gymnastics team for four years.  While at the Academy his career goals changed and though still qualified for pilot training at graduation, he accepted instead an Air Force paid graduate school assignment to Oklahoma State University where he earned a Masters-of-Science in electronics and physics.  His next assignment was the government think-tank MITRE Corp. north of Boston that manages federal R&D Centers and agencies including DARPA's internet-precursor ARPANET.  Next, he was assigned to nearby Electronics Systems Division working with industry on the first AWACS system.  John enjoyed hazardous duty flying status for the entire tour, but DOD blocked combat theatres for officers with TS/SCI-Q level security clearances.  He was offered an Air Force paid Harvard Ph.D. degree in solid state physics, but decided instead to resign his Captain commission after six years and earned a private MBA from Boston University.

Thereafter he became a corporate executive and over 30 years built and ran numerous successful Medical and Biotechnology businesses including two public companies, one of which he took public and ran as President-CEO of that NASDAQ-listed company for 7 years, building annual sales to $500 million before it was sold to a multinational.  Since 2000 he has been growing high technology businesses for his own account, self-funded and with a loose network of close business colleagues and friends.  For the past 4 years he has concentrated on private research using plasma, the fourth state of matter, to rearrange atoms loosened from molecules into clean Hydrogen fuel and its logical carrier Ammonia.  Retirement is not on the horizon.

Beyond his formal educational credentials (BS/MS/MBA) John is management educated in cellular biology, organic chemistry, and high energy physics.  He is a graduate member of the Young Presidents Organization, Northern California chapter, where he spent most of his public business career in the San Francisco area.

He has lived in Sarasota, Florida for the past 33 years.  John and his wife Becky have six grown children between them and twelve healthy grandchildren, two of whom are married.  They are both active athletes in tennis, jogging, and physical fitness.