Dr. John Wisniewski

Dr. John Wisniewski serves as the Program Scientist for the SPHEREx mission, the UVOIR Discipline Lead for APRA, the Program Officer for the Exoplanet Research Program, executive secretary of the ExoPAG, and the Deputy Program Scientist for ExEP.

He obtained his BS in Astronomy-Physics from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1999, where he gained his first research experience working with the HPOL spectropolarimeter at UW’s Pine Bluff Observatory, in support of the Wisconsin Ultraviolet Photo-Polarimeter Experiment (WUPPE) that flew as part of the ASTRO-1 and ASTRO-2 shuttle missions.  He obtained his PhD from the University of Toledo in 2005. Following terms as a NPP Postdoc at NASA/GSFC and a NSF-AAPF at the University of Washington, he served as an assistant professor and tenured associate professor at the University of Oklahoma (OU) for a decade. Wisniewski received the distinctions of Presidential Professor twice at OU, the James and JoAnn Holden Faculty award, and was a Scialog Fellow of the Research Corporation. He has authored over 215 refereed papers in his career in topics spanning circumstellar disks, exoplanets, high contrast imaging, hot stars, cool stars, stellar activity, and polarimetry. He has been at NASA Headquarters since 2023.