Speakers

Speaker profile

John is President of In-Space Industries at Redwire. In this role, he serves the company’s civil, commercial and defense customers with novel biotechnology life and physical science research and manufacturing solutions.

Prior to this, John was President and CEO of Techshot, Inc., which was acquired by Redwire in 2021. John co-founded Techshot in 1988 as a continuation of the space payload development work that he began as an 8th-grade student with his “Chix in Space” experiment that first flew on the ill-fated Challenger and later re-flew on Space Shuttle Discovery (STS-29) in March of 1989. In this role, John was the company’s chief innovator and developed dozens of new technologies enabling research and manufacturing in space for a broad spectrum of federal, institutional, and industrial customers.

John has been involved in the design and development of dozens of in-space research and manufacturing payloads to date and leads seven of Redwire’s ten active payloads on the International Space Station.  John earned the NASA Exceptional Technology Achievement Medal for developing the Techshot Bone Densitometer – the first medical X-ray system ever flown in space, which has successfully performed 156 scans in space to date. He personally flew on the parabolic research flight that 3D bioprinted the first neonatal heart ventricle in microgravity using adult human stem cells.  Besides bioprinting, John oversees the expansion of Redwire’s catalog of in-space manufacturing technologies to include payloads to produce pharmaceuticals, electronics and aerospace-grade titanium components.

John has been a member of the American Society for Gravitational and Space Research for more than 30 years and has presented numerous technical sessions and authored several society publications.  John has eight patents issued to date, with several provisional patents pending, and has published numerous technical papers.

John is a graduate of Purdue University, with a Bachelor of Science degree in mechanical engineering with a specialty in biomedical design.