John Whelan: Biography

I was born April 24, 1969 in the City of Kingston, Ulster County, New York State, USA. I grew up in the Mid-Hudson Valley, and lived there until the fall of 1987. From 1980-1987, I was a student at Poughkeepsie Day School, a really cool progressive private school in Poughkeepsie, New York. From a PDS high school graduating class of eleven, I entered a freshman class of several thousand at Cornell University, which I found to be another very cool place. In addition to a number of wonderful people I met there, some of the things which helped me feel cozy among the thousands were:

The Cornell Astronomy Department

Being the only undergraduate in your major in your class is a good way to combine the resources of a large school with the personal attention of a small department.

The Cornell Strategic Simulations Society

When I arrived at Cornell, the CSSS was composed entirely of wargamers; by the time my class had graduated four years later, we role-players had taken over. Our junior year, Rick Silva, Kim Allen, Rachel Schwartz and I founded Sorcerer's Almanac, Cornell's gaming magazine.

The Cornell University Science Fiction Association

At the beginning of my senior year, I realized that half of my friends were in CUSFA, so I joined, "to meet the other half of my friends". Like most college SF clubs, CUSFA tends to be much more about the personal quirks of those involved than anything else. When I was there, this seemed to revolve around "Captain Carl" Sagan and Wegmans supermarkets. My main CUSFA accomplishment was being the TA for CUSFA 101/102 under Professor Uncle Mikey. I hold the alumni post of Arthur, Keeper of the Sacred Bathrobe.

In 1991, I graduated from Cornell, and went to physics grad school at the University of California, Santa Barbara. I joined the a science fiction/fantasy/vampirism/general weirdness club here called the Shadow Society and held a post called Minister of Abstention. Unfortunately, the club evaporated after two years when its founder Max Rible graduated.

In the autumn of 1993, my advisor went on sabbatical and a couple of us students accompanied him. I spent the last three months of 1993 in Los Alamos, New Mexico. The town of Los Alamos may be a dull company town, but Northern New Mexico is a beautiful place to live; check out the Anasazi sites if you're ever there. For the first six months of 1994, we were in Cambridge, England, at the Isaac Newton Institute, where I learned to appreciate cider, malt vinegar and Blake's Seven.

I spent my last two years in Santa Barbara finishing my dissertation and successfully avoiding fame as a DJ on KCSB-FM, the UCSB radio station.

In 1996, I received my Ph.D. and accepted a two-year postdoctoral position at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. It was nice to live for two years in a place with real seasons again, and I really regret that I only got to go one one real camping trip to one of Southern Utah's beautiful national parks. I didn't do much radio, but did spend half a season on the PA as the Voice of the Skating Utes.

In the fall of 1998, my second postdoc again took me overseas, to the University of Bern in the German-speaking part of Switzerland. In addition to Switzerland itself being a pretty interesting place to live (and an opportunity to become fluent in German, despite the local dialect), its location in the heart of Europe made it pretty easy to visit France or Italy (via SBB/CFF/FSS, the Swiss Federal Railways), Germany (via SBB or SwissAir) and Britain (via EasyJet). The cider in Switzerland (known as suure moscht) is way too sweet and not strong enough, but it's pretty easy to come by Weißbier, for which I developed a taste one weekend in Germany. Another selling point of Bern, and presumably other decent-sized Swiss cities, is that almost all movies (at the cinema) are shown with subtitles (in two languages!) rather than dubbed.

As of Fall 2000 I'm back in the States, if only just barely, doing another postdoc at the University of Texas at Brownsville. Guess my smugness about having studied German and French in lieu of Spanish was premature...