John Horack

John M. Horack is the Neil Armstrong Chair in Aerospace Policy and holds a joint appointment between the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering in the College of Engineering and the John Glenn College of Public Affairs. In September 2025, he was appointed as Ohio State's vice president for research. 

Before coming to Ohio State in 2016, Horack served as vice president for space systems at Teledyne Brown Engineering and  vice president for research at the University of Alabama in Huntsville. He also spent nearly two decades as a NASA civil servant, performing original theoretical and experimental research in high-energy astrophysics, cosmology and gamma-ray bursts, as well as serving as a member of the Senior Executive Service, leading the Science and Mission Systems Office at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center.

With the International Astronautical Federation, he serves as one of the 12 vice presidents, and one of only two Americans, responsible for the technical aspects of the federation and for the evolution of the annual International Astronautical Congress. He also provides significant consultation services to a number of commercial space start-up companies, heads of civil space agencies and economic development interests tied to spaceflight.

Horack is the author or co-author of over 100 scientific papers, conference proceedings and publications across subjects including space policy, atmospheric physics and high-energy astrophysics. He was an important member of the scientific teams that discovered the existence of flashes of gamma-rays from terrestrial thunderstorms and the breakthrough scientific discovery that gamma-ray bursts originate from cosmological distances. He is a sought-after public speaker and authority on space-related matters across the commercial, civil and national security space domains.

Horack holds a doctorate and a master’s degree in astrophysics from the University of Alabama in Huntsville and a bachelor’s degree in physics and astronomy from Northwestern University. He is an FAA-licensed flight instructor, with commercial and instrument pilot ratings.