Dr. John Valentine Shebalin

John V. Shebalin is an Affiliate Research Professor at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, where he teaches a course on magnetohydrodynamics. He retired from NASA in April 2017. He was at NASA Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, from September 1997 until April 2017 and at NASA Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia from September 1987 until September 1997. Before this, he was a Research Associate at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire (1987) and an Assistant Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia (1984–86). He received his Ph.D. in Plasma Physics from the College of William and Mary in Virginia in 1982. Part of his PhD dissertation, “Anisotropy in MHD turbulence due to a mean magnetic field,” was published in the Journal of Plasma Physics in 1983 and, to date, is the most cited paper published by that journal. His primary research interest is in MHD turbulence, particularly in dynamo processes, which began during his doctoral dissertation research when he saw a large-scale coherent structure evolving out of a broad range of initial conditions in numerical simulations of homogeneous MHD turbulence; this led to a long string of papers culminating in a statistical solution to “the dynamo problem” of explaining the fundamental origin of the geomagnetic dipole field. He is a member of the American Physical Society (APS) and the American Geophysical Union (AGU).