John received the B.S. degree in Mathematics at Bucknell University in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania (1983) and Sc.M. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island (1985 and 1989). He joined the faculty at Georgia Tech in 1989, and he is presently a Regents Professor in the School of Interactive Computing (IC) in the College of Computing. From 2021-2022, he served as the Interim School Chair of IC as well. John is additionally an Adjunct Faculty member of the School of Computing Instruction at GT, as he regularly teaches one of the large CS intro courses. In 2013, John was named an Honorary Professor in the School of Computer Science at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. 

John's primary research areas are data and information visualization, approaching each from a human-computer interaction perspective. In 2013, he served as General Chair of the IEEE VIS conference, the flagship academic conference for his research area, when it was held in Atlanta. John received the 2012 IEEE VGTC Visualization Technical Achievement Award, and he was inducted into the ACM CHI Academy in 2016 and the IEEE VIS Academy in 2019. John was named an IEEE Fellow in 2014 and an ACM Fellow in 2022. On the instructional side, John has twice received the College of Computing's annual gus baird Teaching Award. 

John is Director of the Information Interfaces Research Group whose mission is to help people take advantage of information to enrich their lives. As the amount of data available to people and organizations has skyrocketed over the past 10-20 years, largely fueled by the growth of the internet, insufficient methods for people to benefit from this flood of data have been developed. A central focus of many of the group's projects is the creation of information visualization and visual analytics tools to help people explore, analyze, understand, and communicate data sets. In particular, they are creating visual analytics systems to help people with "sense-making" activities on data sets such as large document collections. The group also has developed many techniques and systems for providing people with peripheral awareness of useful information. John's passion about research in, and the value of, data visualization is illustrated in his EuroVis 2014 Conference Capstone invited lecture. He describes his more recent research on designing flexible and natural interfaces for human-data interaction in this 2022 CSIG-VIS lecture.