Dr. Maynard received a BS in Electrical Engineering from the University of New Hampshire in 1960, a MS in Electrical Engineering from MIT in 1962, and a PhD in Physics from the University of New Hampshire in 1966. He joined the Electrodynamics Branch at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center as an Astrophysicist in 1965 and worked with Drs. Aggson and Heppner to develop the passive double probe technique for measuring electric fields. He has been Principal Investigator or Co-Investigator for electric field instrumentation on nine satellite programs (AF, NASA and ESA) and numerous sounding rockets, which have made pioneering electric field measurements from near 60 km in the lower part of the ionospheric D region to the magnetopause and into interplanetary space. He was the principal investigator on the DE-2 Vector Electric Field Instrument (VEFI) which has provided significant new insight into the electric field structure in the ionosphere, both DC and AC, and was the source of the widely used Heppner-Maynard empirical convection model for high latitude electric fields. In 1984 he joined the staff at the Air Force Research Laboratory as Technical Director of the IMPS Program, a capacity he served in through 1988. From 1985 to 1993 he served as Chief of the Space Plasmas and Fields Branch, overseeing a broad spectrum basic and applied research program to specify, predict and mitigate against solar/space weather hazards to DoD assets and operations in space. From 1993 to 2005 he was a member of the technical staff at Mission Research Corporation. He helped organize the team to develop the MRC Integrated Space Weather Model (ISM), a global MHD model simulating the solar wind coupling to the magnetosphere/ionosphere system, and actively participated in its development through testing and validation. Dr. Maynard has published over 200 articles in scientific journals and books, is the holder of one patent, and is recognized worldwide for his expertise in space electrodynamics.

Recent research efforts focus on combining data from multiple sources and regions within the context provided by ISM and other MHD simulations to determine macro-scale temporal and spatial properties of magnetosphere dynamics. Satellite data from Polar and Cluster, ground-based SuperDARN radar, and all-sky optical measurements are harmonized to understand where and on what time scales merging occurs on the dayside magnetopause. This complements investigations of microscale physics at the site of magnetic merging that have begun by the Polar satellite and will be continued in the MMS mission.