John Learned has the title of Professor of Physics at the University of Hawaii, Manoa campus, where he has been on the faculty since 1980. Prior to that he taught and did research at the University of California at Irvine, the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, the University of Wisconsin, and the High Altitude Laboratory at Echo Lake, Colorado. He obtained a PhD in physics at the University of Washington in 1968, an MS from the University of Pennsylvania in 1963, and a BS from Columbia College in 1961. In between schooling he worked for two aerospace companies as an engineer, including the Boeing Company, which was what brought him to Seattle in 1963.

John has a list of over 300 publications, mostly relating to the study of elementary particle physics and astrophysics, and has more than 47 thousand citations and a citation h_hep index of 92 (2018) . He has been a pioneer in the attempt to start a new field of particle astrophysics, viewing the universe in the light of what may be the dominant form of matter, neutrinos. This brought him to Hawaii in 1980 to begin a long process of studying the deep ocean as a venue for this attempt, and developing the technology to do so. He is a world authority in particle astrophysics, and travels widely to give invited lectures at international meetings. Currently his group is heavily involved in several underground experiments in Kamioka, Japan. The Super-Kamiokande experiment is observing neutrinos from our sun, studying neutrinos produced by cosmic rays hitting the earth's atmosphere, looking for the decay of protons, and keeping watch for supernovae in our galaxy. This experiment produced evidence for neutrino oscillations and mass, with much acclaim in 1998 leading to a Nobel Prize in 2015. The group also participated in a landmark long base line neutrino experiment, K2K, in which neutrinos were sent from an accelerator laboratory (KEK) in Japan to the SuperK detector, 250 km through the Japanese alps and muon neutrino oscillations were confirmed.

Another Kamioka based experiment, KamLAND in which John was a charter participant, found direct evidence for oscillations of electron anti-neutrinos originating from reactors around Japan. This conclusively demonstrated that neutrinos do not just disappear but oscillate from one flavor to another, and back again. KamLAND also recorded the signal of neutrinos from radioactive decays throughout the earth, ushering in a new geophysical field. John has also been involved in several new projects involving ultra-high energy neutrino detection in venues ranging from mines, salt domes, the deep ocean, to the desert, antarctica, and to earth satellites in space. In fact he cowrote with Frances Halzen the first letter of intent to NSF for what became IceCube.

Prior to coming to Hawaii, John also did research in cosmic rays and at accelerators. John did the first open water measurements of muon flux versus versus depth in Lake Chelan, Washington for his dissertation, even then aiming for starting neutrino astronomy. During his post-doc for U. Wisconsin he resided on Mt. Evans Colorado and participated in making high energy hadron interaction studies with a large superconducting magnet and liquid hydrogen target. He lived with wife and two children in a log cabin at 10,000' altitude and sometimes would ride his horse to the lab for work (best commuting ever).

Back at Wisconsin, he made the first measurement of the anti-neutron cross section at ANL in 1972. Later he made the first observations of Touschek scattering and of natural beam polarization at the Stanford based electron collider, SPEAR, and also the first photo-production of the newly discover J/Psi particle in early 1975. He was perhaps the first person to know that quarks are spin-1/2 particles via observation of the polarization of single pion production in the Mark II detector.

While continuing to push for neutrino astronomy, John went to UC Irvine for several years prior to moving to Hawaii. During that time and afterwards he was involved in exploring the acoustic detection of neutrinos. In 1977 he and 6 colleagues proposed, won funding, and then built the first large underground neutrino detector, called IMB in a salt mine in Cleveland. This unprecedented 10,000 cubic meter ultra-pure water instrument did not find the hoped for proton decay but did find the first hint at neutrino oscillations in 1983. In 1987 this experiment (and an experiment in Japan) found a group of neutrinos originating in the SuperNova1987A. Until now (2018) no other supernovae from our galactic neighborhood have been observed.

In the last few years John has been pursuing small neutrino and neutron detectors. He has dreamed of large reactor neutrino detectors which can be useful for arms control. A key to this may be development of instruments which are sensitive to incoming neutrino direction. This led to his invention of several new detectors, which turn out to be useful for neutrons as well. He is working with a team attempting to build compact neutron cameras, useful for locating atomic weapons material. He is currently (2018) involved the AIT/Watchman initiative, building a kiloton scale neutrino detector in Boulby, England, aiming at long range nuclear reactor monitoring.

As an aside, over a number of years John has had fun writing some speculative papers (with Tony Zee and Sandip Pakvasa in particular) considering how neutrinos might be useful by advanced civilizations elsewhere, as for example in secure neutrino communications. One wild idea that an advanced civilization could modulate the phase of regularly variable stars (Cepheids and rr Lyrae) led to searching available data bases (with Michael Hippke) and finding a particular star which had a strange nearly repeating pattern of times between peaks, which with help from non-linear dynamics specialists was identified at a "strange non-chaotic oscillator", which means is somewhat repeats... the first example of such in nature! John continues to dabble in some off-beat science areas, and continues to co-author neutrino phenomenology papers with his theory friends.

John's research has brought several millions of dollars to the State. He has mentored twenty seven PhDs while at UH. John participates in community service, but keeps a low profile in campus politics. He aims never to rise above the rank of Professor, and hopes to get in many more years of fundamental physics research and teaching. He was co-recipient of the Rossi Prize in 1989, the Asahi Prize in 1998, and was U. H. Regents Medal for Excellence in Research in 1999. He was awarded the ARCS Scientist of the Year prize in 2007, and the Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics, three times in 2015.

John was born in upstate New York in 1940, his dad a newspaper editor and later science writer, his mom a grade school teacher, and he grew up surrounded by a supportive old-fashioned extended family. He has wonderful grownup children: Bryan who lives in Seattle and Alison who resides in California. Alison has two children Lucia and Zar. John's wife (Dr.) Coleen Cory, is an ecologist. Their present hobbies, include lots of reading, gardening and travel, and hosting a large lamb roast for a hundred people and other gatherings of friends and colleagues. For quite a few years they have been renovating a house on Waialae Nui ridge. John has a great woodshop after the last house expansion, and he and his friend Ken have been making fine furniture, some of which was exhibited at the 2018 Hawaii Woodshow at the Honolulu Academy of Arts.