Professor John is a Chartered Psychologist and a Fellow of the British Psychological Society. He has been REF-lead for Psychology at several institutions, is a former honorary General Secretary of the British Psychological Society, and President of the Traffic and Transport division of the International Association of Applied Psychology.

John is a Professor of Psychology at Nottingham Trent University, UK and has held chairs in Psychology at the University of Surrey (1995-2008), University College Cork, (2008-12, also Head of School) and the University of Hull (2012-2017). In addition, he is/has been Honorary Professor at Cork and Surrey. Before these professorial appointments, Professor John was a member of the Medical Research Council’s Applied Psychology Unit in Cambridge from the mid-80s to mid-90s, where he went to following his PhD at Queen’s University, Belfast (1984).

John’s primary research interests are in the measurement of cognitive function; the factors that can protect (sleep, practice, aptitude, genes, pharmaceuticals) or challenge (sleep loss, circadian phase, pain, brain injury, age, inexperience) performance, and the relevance of what we measure under controlled laboratory circumstances to everyday functioning (e.g. activities of daily living, work, driving, etc.).

John also conducts research on the effects of disease and disability on sleep, and vice versa, shift working and operator safety in complex settings. Much of his work is necessarily multidisciplinary and focuses increasingly on the biological and neurological underpinning of cognitive performance.

John is the author of two books and the founding editor of Elsevier’s Transportation Research: Traffic Psychology and Behaviour; and author of 80+, peer-reviewed publications, and over 200 book chapters, reports, etc.