John Dabiri is the Centennial Chair Professor at Caltech, with appointments in the Graduate Aerospace Laboratories (GALCIT) and Mechanical Engineering. Dabiri is a MacArthur Fellow and a Fellow of the American Physical Society as well as the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering. Other honors include the Alan T. Waterman Award from the National Science Foundation, the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE), the Office of Naval Research Young Investigator Program Award, and being named one of MIT Technology Review's "35 Innovators Under 35" as well as one of Popular Science's "Brilliant 10."

Dabiri serves on President Biden's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST), and was a key author of the PCAST Report to the President: Modernizing Wildland Firefighting to Protect Our Firefighters, February 2023, in which XPRIZE was highlighted on page 22 as an example of autonomous technology and public-private partnerships.  

John also serves as the Secretary of Energy Advisory Board (SEAB), the Board of Directors of NVIDIA Corporation, and the Board of Trustees of the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation. He previously served as Chair of the American Physical Society Division of Fluid Dynamics, as well as a member of the National Academies' Committee on Science, Technology, and Law; the editorial boards of the Journal of Fluid Mechanics and the Journal of the Royal Society Interface; the U.S. National Committee for Theoretical and Applied Mechanics (USNCTAM); the Defense Science Study Group; and as an Advisor to X at Alphabet (formerly GoogleX).

Dabiri received his B.S.E.  summa cum laude in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering from Princeton University (2001); his M.S. in Aeronautics from Caltech (2003); and his Ph.D. in Bioengineering with a minor in Aeronautics from Caltech (2005). He was a Professor of Aeronautics and Bioengineering at Caltech from 2005 to 2015, during which time he also served as Director of the Center for Bioinspired Wind Energy, Chair of the Faculty, and Dean of Students. From 2015 to 2019 he served as a Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering and of Mechanical Engineering at Stanford University, where he was recognized with the Eugene L. Grant Award for Excellence in Teaching.