John Knox is the Josiah Meigs Distinguished Teaching Professor of Geography at the University of Georgia (UGA), where he also serves as associate director and undergraduate coordinator for the UGA Atmospheric Sciences Program. A native of tornado-prone Birmingham, Alabama, John decided to become a meteorologist at the age of five.

After receiving a B.S. in mathematics at UAB, John earned a Ph.D. in atmospheric sciences in 1996, specializing in atmospheric dynamics. John was a post-doctoral fellow at Columbia University and then an assistant professor of geography and meteorology at Valparaiso University before relocating to UGA in 2001.

John has published over 70 peer-reviewed articles while also teaching nearly 8,500 students. In 2010 John received the T. Theodore Fujita Research Achievement Award from the National Weather Association for his work on clear-air turbulence forecasting, and was elected a Fellow of the American Meteorological Society in 2020. He has won nearly 30 teaching awards at the student organization, departmental, college, university, system, city, county, state, regional, and national levels.

Abstract: Immediately after receiving my first book about the weather at the age of five, I decided to become a meteorologist.  My heroes were the meteorologists at the National Weather Service in Birmingham, especially J.B. Elliott, who through NOAA Weather Radio became the soundtrack and DJ of my youth in the years before The Weather Channel.  In college my heroes were my professors, and I was encouraged to go to graduate school and become a professor myself.  Frank Makosky, the MIC of the NWS WSFO in Birmingham and supervisor of my honors internship at the Birmingham office, had a serious piece of advice for me before I graduated from UAB and headed to grad school at Wisconsin: "Don't forget about operations."  This invited talk is composed of a series of vignettes illustrating how I have successfully collaborated with NOAA meteorologists on practical topics in forecasting, despite the bias of academia and national funding agencies against applied research.  The talk will conclude with an impassioned plea for more academic-public sector collaborations, passing on Frank Makosky's advice to a new generation of budding atmospheric scientists.