Biography

John P. Verboncoeur received a Ph.D. (1992) in nuclear engineering from the University of California at Berkeley (UCB). After a postdoc at Lawrence Livermore National Lab and UCB, he was appointed Associate Research Engineer at UCB. He joined the UCB Nuclear Engineering faculty in 2001 (Full Professor in 2008), where he cofounded and chaired the Computational Engineering Science program (2001-2010). In 2011, he was appointed Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, and Professor of Computational Mathematics, Science, and Engineering (added in 2015) at Michigan State University (MSU), where he currently serves as Associate Dean for Research and Graduate Studies in the College of Engineering. His research interests are in theoretical and computational plasma physics, with a broad range of applications spanning low temperature plasmas for lighting, thrusters and materials processing to hot plasmas for fusion, from ultra-cold plasmas to particle accelerators, from beams to pulsed power, from intense kinetic nonequilibrium plasmas to high power microwaves. He is the author/coauthor of the MSU (formerly Berkeley) suite of particle-in-cell Monte Carlo (PIC-MC) codes, including XPDP1 and XOOPIC, used by over 1000 researchers worldwide with over 450 journal publications in the last decade. He has authored/coauthored over 400 journal articles and conference papers, with over 4900 citation. He is Past President of the IEEE Nuclear and Plasma Sciences Society, past IEEE Director, past Acting VP of IEEE Publications, Services, and Products Board, and serves on the Board of Directors for the American Center for Mobility national proving ground. He is Associate Editor of Physics of Plasmas, and serves on the DOE Fusion Energy Science Advisory Committee as well as the Sandia National Laboratories Grand Challenge LDRD External Advisory Board. He has led a number of successful startups, including computerized fitness equipment, digital health systems, and distributed publication software, with a role in the USPS mail forwarding system and the consumer credit report for a big-three credit bureau.