John Weishampel, PhD
John F. Weishampel PhD is the Interim Dean of the College of Graduate Studies (CGS). He is a Professor in the Department of Biology, serving as the graduate program director for seven years, and led the development of the Conservation Biology PhD and certificate programs. He received his bachelor’s degree in biology at Duke University and his master’s and doctoral degrees in environmental sciences at the University of Virginia. Upon graduating he was a National Research Council Research Associate in the Biospheric Sciences Branch at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. His research focused on using remote sensing techniques to characterize forest ecosystem properties to understand global environmental change.
Dr. Weishampel joined UCF in 1995. He taught courses in environmental science, ecology, and global change biology. He has mentored scores of undergraduate and graduate students and postdoctoral scholars. He secured federal funding from ED, EPA, NSF, NASA, NOAA, and USDA and received the NSF CAREER and NASA New Investigator awards. He served as a Fulbright Distinguished Research Chair in the Department of Geography at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia and as a Fulbright Senior Scholar in Remote Sensing and Landscape Systems at Albert Ludwig University of Freiburg in Germany. He has had appointments as a visiting professor at the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences (EHESS) in Paris, as a Charles Bullard Fellow at Harvard University, and as a Fulbright Intercountry Scholar at the University of Zaragoza in Spain. His research career expanded into the marine environment, focusing on sea turtle ecology. While collaborating with anthropologists, he became a pioneer in the use of LiDAR remote sensing to detect archaeological features below forest canopies.
From 2015 to 2024, he was the CGS Senior Associate Dean and Director of Interdisciplinary Studies. He was responsible for new degree program development, implementing and overseeing the Office of Postdoctoral Affairs, and serving as the principal investigator on grants funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and the Council of Graduate Schools. He has served as an Intergovernmental Personnel Act (IPA) Program Officer at the National Science Foundation in the Division of Graduate Education for two years. During this time, he was responsible for administering the cross-directorate NSF Research Traineeship (NRT) and Innovations in Graduate Education (IGE) programs, which supported over 100 academic institutions and thousands of STEM graduate students. He is currently a member of the AAAS SEA (STEMM Equity Achievement) Change and Sloan Equitable Pathways Partnership (EPP) programs.