During his undergraduate degree in molecular biology at UC Berkeley, John began working in the field of comparative protein function in the lab of Steven Brenner.

John joined the lab in 2008 as a graduate student in the Harvard MCO program. He was co-supervised by Andres Leschziner, and applied biochemistry, structural biology and developmental genetics to understand the function and evolution of the oskar gene in insects.

John is currently a Group Leader at BioNTech US.