John Alora

Captain John Irvin Alora is the Secretary of the Air Force STEM Fellow and a Ph.D. student in the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics at Stanford under the supervision of Professor Marco Pavone. He received his commission as a distinguished graduate from the United States Air Force Academy in 2014, where he obtained his B.S. in Electrical Engineering with a minor in Arabic. He obtained the M.S. degree in Aeronautics and Astronautics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2016 where he was a Draper Research Fellow at Draper Labs and a graduate research assistant in the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems. John’s research interests involve the development of physics-based machine learning algorithms for safe and efficient control of complex robotic and aerospace systems. He served as an operational B-52 pilot with more than 1,000 flight hours including more than 300 combat hours in support of Operation Freedom’s Sentinel, Operational Spartan Shield, and the Resolute Support mission.