John Augustine earned his Ph.D. in information and computer science in 2006 from the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Science, University of California, Irvine, USA. Since then, his career has spanned both academia and industry. In 2011, he joined the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at IIT Madras, where he is currently an associate professor. Prior to IIT Madras, he spent two years as a scientist at Tata Research Development and Design Centre, Pune, India and two years as a research fellow at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.

His research interests are in designing and analyzing algorithms for foundational problems inspired by a wide range of applications. In the last few years, he has been interested in designing randomized algorithms for distributed computing environments and employing probabilistic techniques to analyze them. In the foreseeable future, he hopes to invest time in understanding distributed computing aspects (such as effective overlay maintenance, Byzantine fault tolerance, etc) of peer-to-peer applications like distributed ledger technologies, esp., cryptocurrencies.