Dr. John is the former Vice President of Sandia's California Division. The principal programs of the division, located in Livermore, CA, include nuclear weapons stewardship, weapons demilitarization, chemical/bio- logical weapons defense, combustion and materials research, advanced lithography development, micro-chemical and remote laser based chemical detection, and distributed, secure advanced computational and information systems.

In her previous position as Director of the Center for Exploratory Systems and Development, Dr. John led a multi-disciplinary organization of physical scientists, engineers, mathematicians, and computer scientists whose mission is to undertake major new initiatives for the California Division. Areas of emphasis included WMD non- and counter-proliferation, UAV based measurements to support global climate change studies and nonproliferation applications, computational biochemistry, laser remote sensing and biological based microsensor development, weapons demilitarization systems development, nuclear weapon use control component development, and DOE complex system modeling.

Prior to her position as Vice President, Dr. John served in a number of managerial and technical roles for the laboratory, including nuclear weapons development, systems analysis, and thermal analysis/fluid mechanics R&D. Her management assignments built on a technical foundation of research in experimental and theoretical studies in heterogeneous catalysis, thermodynamics, and multi-phase reacting flow, and post-doctoral and initial Sandia assignments in alternative energy concepts analysis and simulation.

Concurrent with her Sandia assignments, Dr. John has been recruited for a number of defense community efforts. She is a member of the Department of Defense's Threat Reduction Advisory Committee (for which she chairs the Nuclear Deterrent Transformation Panel), the National Research Council's Naval Studies Board and Board on Army Science and Technology. She is a recent past member of the Air Force Scientific Advisory Board and DOE's National Commission on Science and Security. She is a National Associate of the National Academies of Science and Engineering.

Dr. John received a B.S. in Chemistry from Rice University, an M.S. in Chemical Engineering from Tulane University, and a Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from Princeton University.

Dr. John has served on the Advisory Board for the Department of Chemical Engineering at Princeton, and is a member of the Executive Advisory Committee for the National Science Foundation's Science and Technology Center for Environmentally Responsible Solvents and Processes at North Carolina State University/University of North Carolina and the Technical Division Advisory Board for the Engineering and Science Directorate at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. She is also a member of the Board of Directors of ANSER Corporation. She was named CCST Council Vice Chair in January 2008, and serves concurrently on the CCST Board.