Dr. John W. Bonnell was born in El Paso, TX.  He grew up in New Mexico, Montana, and Colorado, spending most of his school years in southern Jefferson Country, just outside Littleton, CO.

He did his undergraduate work in Physics at UC Berkeley, and worked with Cindy Cattell and Chuck Carlson at UCB Space Sciences Laboratory (SSL) while a student and during a pair of gap years before graduate studies.  He did his doctoral studies in Plasma Physics and Electrical Engineering at Cornell under Paul Kintner, Mike Kelley, and Charles Seyler, working on spectral and interferometric studies of auroral waves and their role in ion acceleration.

After Cornell, John took a post doc with the Space and Atmospheric Physics group at Los Alamos Nat’l Laboratory, working on meso-scale auroral electrodynamics in the auroral oval and polar cap and characterization of ion distributions across the dayside magnetopause.

He took his current position as a Research Associate and Project Physicist at UCB SSL in Oct 1999.  His focus since the early 2000’s has been the design, implementation, and use of electric field instrumentation for Heliophysics applications, serving as E-field hardware and science Co-I on the THEMIS, Van Allen Probes, and Parker Solar Probe (PSP) missions.  Since 2013, he has been actively involved in the NASA sounding rocket program as a PI, Co-I, and member of the Sounding Rocket Working Group, and has brought auroral sounding rockets back to SSL after a nearly 15-year hiatus.  He is the Instrument Lead for the TRACERS Electric Field Instrument (EFI), and an active member of the THEMIS, PSP, and TRACERS science team.

His scientific interests include the coupling of the solar wind into the Earth’s magnetosphere; the manifestations of that coupling that include the Earth’s northern lights, radiation belts and geomagnetic storms, and of course, designing, building, and flying better and better electric field experiments in space.

He reads voraciously, enjoying sci-fi, fantasy, horror, classics, non-fiction science, and political books.  When time permits, he tinkers with carpentry, woodworking, and electronics, as well as manual labor in the yard.