2026 Awardee - John Knox, University of Georgia

John Knox has been awarded the 2026 Neil Miner Award by the National Association of Geoscience Teachers

John Knox is the Josiah Meigs Distinguished Teaching Professor of Geography at the University of Georgia (UGA) in Athens, GA, as well as Associate Director and Undergraduate Coordinator of UGA's Atmospheric Sciences Program. John received a B.S. in mathematics from the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) in 1988, where he was a finalist for the Rhodes Scholarship, and earned a Ph.D. in atmospheric sciences from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1996, where he was a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow.  After a post-doctoral fellowship at Columbia University in conjunction with the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, John began his teaching career at Valparaiso University before relocating to UGA in 2001 to spend more time with family, ultimately spending over seven years as a non-tenure-track faculty member. He has taught approximately 8,000 students in his career in over 170 sections of 40 different course titles in atmospheric sciences, physical geography, and engineering. John has also published 70 peer-reviewed articles in atmospheric sciences, geoscience education, and mathematics. In 2010 John received the T. Theodore Fujita Research Achievement Award from the National Weather Association for his research on clear-air turbulence forecasting, and he was elected a Fellow of the American Meteorological Society in 2020. John has won 30 different teaching/mentoring/advising awards at the departmental, college, student organization, university, city, county, university system, state, regional, and national levels.