Personal: Male. Born in USA.

John E. Naugle was trained as a physicist at the University of Minnesota and began his career studying cosmic rays by launching balloons to high altitudes. In 1959 he joined NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland, where he developed projects to study the magnetosphere. In 1960 he took charge of NASA's Fields and Particles research program. He also served as NASA's Associate Administrator for the Office of Space Science and as the agency's Chief Scientist before his retirement in 1981.