John Sotham
Adjunct Instructor, Associate Director, Career and Talent Development Office
Lee Caplin School of Communication and Journalism
Areas of Expertise: Journalism, Aircraft and Aerospace, National Security
Bio
John Sotham is a retired Air Force colonel with 30 years of active and reserve service primarily in aircraft maintenance, security forces/air base defense, and manpower and personnel. His assignments included two squadron command tours—one Stateside and one while deployed to Afghanistan. He was a student and instructor at Air Command and Staff College, where he studied national security, joint planning and military leadership. He next served at U.S. Southern Command as a political-military affairs officer, as the detachment commander in charge of Air Force Reserve personnel, and as chief of the manpower and organization division, where he was involved in coordinating joint and interagency personnel augmentation during SOUTHCOM’s whole-of-government response to the devastating 2010 earthquake in Haiti.He is a former associate editor of Air & Space Smithsonian, where he was the researcher and aerospace technical editor for special edition posters and was the magazine’s book reviews editor. He traveled nationally and internationally for Air & Space—some of his favorite assignments included reporting from Moscow and the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on the Soyuz launch that carried the first crew to the International Space Station, an extended tour of England and Scotland writing about obscure airports and aviation museums, and flying with the U.S. Coast Guard’s International Ice Patrol to the wreck site of the RMS Titanic to conduct a burial at sea of one of the ship’s last survivors.
Mr. Sotham is an adjunct instructor in the Lee Caplin School of Communication and Journalism within FIU College of Architecture and the Arts and currently services as an Associate Director within the university’s Career and Talent Development office.