About John
John grew up in Germantown in the ‘90s as the oldest of three siblings in a family of five.
He did Junior ROTC and Boy Scouts as a teenager (eventually making Eagle Scout with a lot of help from his dad), and graduated from Seneca Valley High School in 2008. He got a lucky break at that time when he won an Army ROTC scholarship to Princeton University, where he majored in public policy and international affairs and—more importantly—met his future wife, Christina.
John graduated Princeton in 2012 and commissioned as a lieutenant in the U.S. Army. He began active duty the day after Christmas and served in line infantry and artillery battalions at Fort Wainwright, Alaska, and in a basic combat training (boot camp) unit at Fort Sill, Oklahoma. He was honorably discharged from active duty and returned to civilian life in mid-2017.
John and Christina got married in 2015, while still living 4,000 miles apart. John returned to Maryland upon getting out of the Army, and he and Christina lived for a couple of years in Odenton while John completed a master’s degree at George Washington University. In 2019, with a baby on the way and John looking for a job after finishing grad school, John and Christina bought a home in Brunswick after deciding that Point of Rocks wasn’t much of a town in comparison.
John and Christina’s decision to move to Brunswick continues to pay off.
John’s rationale for moving to Brunswick was simple:
1) He wanted to be as far from Washington, D.C., as possible while still being able to commute there;
2) He wanted to be near hills and good hiking, and;
3) After having grown up in Germantown (a “census-designated place”), he wanted to be a citizen of a real town and have the opportunity to participate in local government.
That decision continues to pay off. John and Christina’s oldest son, William, was born shortly after they moved here, and Brunswick weathered the tumult of 2020 much better than many other places. Their second son, Peter, was born a couple of years later. John works from home part of the week (an unintended result of the pandemic), and on the weekends he gets to take the boys to the playground or out hiking on the Appalachian Trail.
John works at the Wisconsin Project on Nuclear Arms Control, a D.C.-based nonprofit organization that works with the State Department to help keep destructive weapons out of the wrong hands. Through that job and his time as a student, he’s been around the world a bit (India, Russia, China, Mongolia, Vietnam, Jordan, Tajikistan, and Oman, to name a few). But he always appreciates home the most, and home these days—and for the foreseeable future—is Brunswick.
