Dr. Joe Sivo is originally from Union City, NJ now living with his wife in Fair Lawn, NJ. He received his undergraduate degree in Mechanical Engineering from the Cooper Union in New York City in 1987, and his Master's and Doctoral Degrees in Mechanical Engineering from the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena CA, finishing in 1996. In graduate school, his research, funded by the Air Force, involved the study of the fluid mechanics of supersonic film cooling with application to hypersonic vehicles and scramjet engines. Funded by NASA, he also studied hydrodynamic instability in centripetal pumps with application to solving problems with a newly developed high-pressure liquid oxygen turbopump for the Space Shuttle main engines.
While in graduate school, he consulted for Rockwell Science Center by computationally modeling transonic wave drag with application to the Advanced Tactical Fighter (later developed into the F-22 Raptor). Upon finishing graduate school, he started a small scientific instrumentation company designing and building astronomical research equipment, for which he won a “Top Ten Products of the Year” award in 1998 from the editors of Sky and Telescope magazine. He was actively involved in political, advocacy and charitable organizations in his hometown in the late 1990’s and 2000’s and served as a Trustee of the Union City Public Library and a Commissioner of the Union City Redevelopment Agency. He also founded two not-for-profit charitable corporations there. In 2002, he supplied some of his company's equipment to the newly constructed Emil Buehler Trust Observatory at Bergen Community College and became actively involved in volunteering to help run the Observatory. He began teaching Astronomy at Bergen Community College in 2003 as an adjunct professor, where he is now a full Professor of Physics teaching Astronomy, Physics and Engineering Mechanics. He was the first advisor to the STEM Student Union when it was founded in 2012 and was the first Chair of the STEM Student Scholars Program in 2017-18. His STEM research project interests include energy systems, scientific instrumentation development, drones, computer vision and neural networks. Dr. Sivo is an avid vegetable and fruit gardener, spending his free time nurturing Peach trees, Asian pear trees, Tropical fruit trees, artichoke plants, blackberry and blueberry plants as well as raising a small flock of egg-laying chickens and by artificial selection, he is attempting to create the perfect cultivar of sauce tomato.