John was previously a member of Stanford's Hydra research group, which investigated a thread-level speculative Single-Chip Multiprocessor. John completed his PhD in Electrical Engineering at Stanford University at the end of 2006. His research focused on building a Flexible Architecture for Simulation and Testing, FAST . His dissertation describes the hardware and software required to build a reconfigurable prototyping platform focused on implementing computer architectures with novel memory system designs like Hydra or other thread-level parallel architectures. There is a brief description of FAST available on Wikipedia if reading a dissertation is not your thing.

John received his BS in Computer Science and Engineering from the University of Washington in 1997. He later spent two years as a faculty research assistant for the Computer Science department at the University of Maryland in College Park. Simultaneoulsy, John worked on various bioinformatics projects at Johns Hopkins Medical Institute for the Department of Pathology. John was awarded his MS in Electrical Engineering from Stanford with an emphasis in Compilers and Digital Circuit Design in 2001. John also spent three years working in the Niagara Architecture Performance Group for Sun Microsystems from 2003-2006.

John is a Researcher in Microsoft Research's Silicon Valley lab, which he joined in March, 2007. His widely varied research interests include computer architecture, embedded systems, application behavior and performance tuning, and hardware-software co-design and interaction.