John’s research background is in MEMS actuators. For his Ph.D. research he designed and fabricated actuator arrays for moving flat objects (such as silicon dice). Two actuator array chips were realized. The first consisted of actuators that had independent thermal and electrostatic means for deflection. The second array used thermal actuators only but were fabricated over pre-fabricated control circuits, thus creating one of the few examples of a CMOS integrated, micromachined manipulation arrays. This work is continued by Professor Karl-F. Böhringer (University of Washington, Seattle) of the Electrical Engineering department and is applying John’s actuator technology as a possible component in a docking system for centimeter scale spacecraft. In 1998, he joined the Systems and Practices Lab at Xerox PARC to work on the modular robotics project and is currently involved with the mechanical design of the Proteo portion of the project.