John Conklin

Assistant Director

John Conklin is an Associate Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at the University of Florida. He joined the UF faculty in 2012 after a three-year research associateship at the W.W. Hansen Experimental Physics Laboratory at Stanford. He received his BS and MEng degrees from Cornell and PhD from Stanford in 2009. In 2011, John was the Fulbright Junior Lecturer at the University of Trento in Italy. He has served as Chair of NASA’s Physics of the Cosmos Program Analysis Group and Vice-Chair of NASA’s Astrophysics Advisory Committee. John has been awarded the NASA Group Achievement Award (2005) for the Gravity Probe B science team, the Balhaus Prize (2009) for best PhD thesis in Aeronautics and Astronautics at Stanford, the Zeldovich Medal (2010) from COSPAR & the Russian Academy of Sciences, the NASA Early Career Faculty Award (2014), NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Technology Fellowship in Space Astrophysics for Early Career Researchers (2015), Teacher of the Year Award (2015) in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at UF, and the Space Science Award from AIAA (2016) for the Gravity Probe B science team.