John Walter Woodbury (1923–2017) was an American electrophysiologist and author of the first textbook explanation of the Hodgkin-Huxley_model studies of the action potential.
He applied physical and mathematical techniques to experimentally elucidate the nature of electrical excitability in cells.
He received a Bachelor of Science in Physics from the University of Utah in 1943, and from 1943 to 1945 was a staff member of the MIT Radiation Laboratory.
In 1950 Woodbury joined the faculty of the University of Washington as an Instructor in the Department of Physiology, and was promoted to Assistant Professor and elected to the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1952.
[4] In the course of his doctoral studies Woodbury published several papers[5][6][7][8] and additionally spent time with Gilbert Ling at the University of Chicago learning to pull Ling-Gerard[9] micro-electrodes and measuring the membrane potential of frog sartorius muscle.