Professor John R. Cary graduated with a BA in Math and Physics from the University of California, Irvine, and received his MA and Ph.D. in Physics from the University of California at Berkeley. Prof. Cary spent two years at the Los Alamos National Laboratory and four years at the Institute for Fusion Studies (University of Texas).

In 1984, Prof. Cary went to the University of Colorado (CU) at Boulder, where he has been the primary graduate thesis advisor for nine graduate students. At CU, Prof. Cary has served as Department Chair, Director, and Area Teaching Scholar. In the latter position he mentored all incoming faculty in the Natural Sciences in teaching and proposal writing.

Professor Cary's research is in the areas of computational physics, plasma physics, beam physics, and nonlinear dynamics. He has published more than eighty articles in refereed journals, and has given more than fifty invited talks. His current interests include high-performance computing and distributed computing, especially as applied to the analysis of physical systems.