After completing his undergraduate education at Emory University (1992-1996), John Rawls received a Ph.D. in developmental biology from Washington University in St. Louis under the mentorship of Stephen Johnson (1996-2001). He then trained as a postdoctoral fellow with Jeffrey Gordon at the Center for Genome Sciences at Washington University (2001-2006). He opened his independent research laboratory in 2006 at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill before moving to Duke University in 2013. Rawls also serves as Director for the Duke Microbiome Center since 2014, which provides resources and training in the microbiome sciences to the Duke University community. He was named as a Pew Scholar in the Biomedical Sciences in 2008, a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2016 and a Fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology in 2021.