John A. Wood
A Life
A recent headshot of John Wood smiling.

I was born (1932) and raised in Virginia. My college education was at Virginia Polytechnic Institute, my Dad’s school. I majored in Geology, for the usual “love of the outdoors” reason.

There I learned optical mineralogy, among other things.

Thence to graduate school at MIT in Geology and Geophysics, under Prof. G. J. F. MacDonald (Fig.1).

My minor at MIT was Astronomy, which took me to Harvard, where I met Fred Whipple (Fig. 2). There I also met mineralogist Clifford Frondel. Cliff had access to a set of thin sections of stony meteorites (Figs. 3a, 3b) that had been collected by J. Lawrence Smith in the 19th century. These interested me, because my assigned readings at MIT included such meteorites, and here were samples of them. Frondel lent me the chest of thin sections, and I bicycled them back to MIT to examine “in my spare time.” The 'chondrules' in stony meteorites charmed me so much that I asked my advisors to let me change my thesis topic to meteorite studies.

After MIT and a post-ROTC stint in the Army (Fig. 4) I took a Postdoctoral year at Cambridge University (UK), then toured much of Europe.

A photograph of Professor G. J. F. MacDonald.
Fig 1. Gordon MacDonald (photo from Wikipedia).
Four of the meteorite researchers at Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory: Fred Whipple, Ursula Marvin, Mikhail Petaev, and John A. Wood.
Fig. 2. Meteorite researchers at Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory (SAO).
Left to right: Fred Whipple, Ursula Marvin, Mikhail Petaev, myself.
A thin section of stony meteorites at Harvard University, originally collected by J. Lawrence Smith.
Fig. 3a. Meteorite thin sections at Harvard University.
Cliff Frondel giving a speech standing at a podium at Harvard University.
Fig 3b. Cliff Frondel at Harvard University.
A photo of John Wood wearing his army uniform in 1958.
Fig 4. Myself in the Army, 1958 (photo by E. Mathilde Wood).

Upon return to the U.S., I published several papers about chondrules and their host chondrites [2-5].

The cover page for chondrules and their host chondritesShowing page 152 for chondrules and their host chondrites.Showing page 162 for chondrules and their host chondrites.Showing page 163 for chondrules and their host chondrites.
Papers about chondrules and their host chondrites.

These papers attracted the attention of Edward Anders (the current authority on the subject, Fig. 5), and he liked them well enough to invite me to join him at the University of Chicago. I accepted, and joined his research group in Chicago.

A head shot of Edward Anders from the University of Chicago.
Fig 5. Edward Anders (University of Chicago).
John Wood's logo
Copyright © 2024 John A. Wood
Created by Grafton Studio