John Shafer is a member of Microsoft Search Labs in Mountain View, California, where he is working on using data mining to improve search quality.

He received a B.S. in Computer Science and Engineering from Cornell University in 1992, and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Wisconsin - Madison in 1998. His thesis was on the design and implementation of parallel algorithms for large-scale data-mining, most of this work being done while a member of the Quest Data Mining group at IBM Almaden Research Center (1994-2000). The implementations of these algorithms were subsequently incorprated into IBM's Intelligent Miner for Data product.

Prior to joining Search Labs, John worked in industry for 6 years, first at Propel Systems (2000-2001), developing a scalable and distributed platform for eCommerce, and more recently at BEA Systems, developing core infrastructure for their Business Process Modeling and Enterprise Service Bus products, shipping several versions of each over the last 4.5 years.