Name:	Mike Ford
Works For:	Unified School District Holton, KS
Email:	Click here to Email Mike.

Biography:
Mike Ford has been an amatuer astronomer for over 40 years, working mainly with total and grazing occultations in the early days. Now, works with active galaxies, blazars, near earth objects and comets. He has also had a lot of interest in the jovian planets and their exploration. For the past 20 years, he has been a professional educator. He began teaching sixth grade science in Holton, Kansas and then moved to the high school to teach astronomy, earth science and broadcast journalism. Some of his achievements include the Toyota TAPESTRY Award for CCD Imaging in 1993, Christa McAuliffe Fellowship Award in 2000, Milken Family Foundation Award for science education in 2001, and Distinguished Kansan of the Year in 2001 for science education. From the Christa McAuliffe award, his school district built the first robotic observatory in Kansas. For the past ten years, he has been involved in working in astronomy education with much of my work done in the Starlab portable planetarium and activities from various NASA programs including the Galileo Fellowship Program, SSEP, and the Gamma Ray Large Area Space Telescope (GLAST). I received a B.A. in Communications from Washburn University in Topeka, Kansas and an M.S. in Geosciences from Mississippi State University in 2000.