John R. Clarke, Ph.D. is a diving life support scientist and Fellow in Undersea and Hyperbaric Medicine (FUHM). He won the 2022 NOGI Award for Science from the Academy of Underwater Arts and Sciences. Clarke served the Navy for over 39 years and conducted numerous research studies on dives as deep as 450 meters. In his spare time, he authored three novels about deep saturation diving.
After 27 years as the Scientific Director of the Navy Experimental Diving Unit (NEDU), he retired, then returned to Federal Service to assist the COVID Task Force. Under Clarke Life Support Consulting, he now consults for various defense contractors.
Clarke participated in Smithsonian/National Science Foundation (NSF) Polar diving programs in the Arctic and Antarctic. He served on the Diving Control Board for the NSF Antarctic Science Diving Program. He also chaired the Diving Control Board of FSU’s Advanced Diving Program.
Before moving to Florida, he conducted diving research for twelve years at the Naval Medical Research Institute, Bethesda, MD. Earlier, he was a Parker B. Francis Foundation Fellow in Pulmonary Research in the Department of Physiology, University of Florida School of Medicine. While there, he conducted physiological research on a record-setting NEDU dive to 1500 feet of seawater.
Before that, he was a Research Associate in Biophysics at Case Western Reserve School of Medicine in Cleveland.
His B.S. and M.S. were in Applied Biology at Georgia Tech. He earned his Doctorate in Physiology at Florida State University. Clarke was a graduate of the Navy and NOAA-sponsored Scientist-In-The-Sea program of the 1970s.
His two children and one grandchild are divers. His son-in-law is a NOAA research biologist and diver.
While a fan of all rebreathers, his preferred diving rig is a semiclosed rebreather designed for military service, the Dräger Dolphin featured on the cover of this book.