Home > Blog Posts > 2013-2015 Sinai and Synapses Fellows > John ZuHone, PhD

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John ZuHone CropJohn ZuHone, PhD grew up on a farm in east central Illinois where the night sky was very dark, and early on developed a passion for astronomy. His parents indulged his interests with a small telescope and a Commodore 64 personal computer at age six. Today, John is a postdoctoral research associate in astrophysics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and uses some of the world’s fastest supercomputers to simulate collisions between clusters of galaxies, the most energetic events in the universe since the Big Bang.

John was also raised in a devout Christian family with Lutheran and Baptist influences, and as a result developed an appreciation for both the evangelical and catholic streams of Christian spirituality. He is particularly inspired by the ancient Christian emphasis on the inherent goodness of creation and the necessarily material and embodied nature of the Christian’s relationship with God, especially with respect to sacramental theology. John seeks to embody the principle that good science and serious Christian spirituality need not be at odds, as they are often seen to be in contemporary American culture.
John earned his B.S. in physics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, his M.S. and Ph.D. in astronomy at the University of Chicago, and has previously held postdoctoral research positions at Harvard University and NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. He lives in Quincy, Massachusetts with his wife Jessi, who is a home hospice nurse. They attend Park Street Church in Boston.