Profile: John is a PhD student at MIT studying ordering and curvature in membranes with Professor Mehran Kardar. His research focuses on understanding how in-plane order influences the shape of membranes. Widely observed shapes in membranes and thin films are often the result of geometry and topology rather than particular chemical reactions or a unique tuning of parameters. Energy dissipation under geometrical and topological constraints can guide a system into fascinating patterns. Our understanding of these emergent structures builds on several areas of physics, biology, and chemistry. For example, as a living cell dissipates energy through chemical reactions in its cytoskeleton and molecular machines floating in its membrane, the cell's shape adjusts. The resulting shapes are increasingly accessible to physical models and simulations.

John is also working on experimental realizations of these theoretical models in collaboration with Professor Jacques Dumais' group at Harvard.

John is also Founder and CTO of MetaCarta, a software company founded in 1999 that sells geographic information retrieval systems to governments, natural resource companies, and digital publishers. MetaCarta is the pioneer of geographic text search. At MetaCarta, John focuses on new technology explorations and partnerships.

John holds a B.S. in physics with distinction from Yale University where he led Yale's first solar car team to the top rookie seat of Sunyrace 97.