John Patton received his PhD at Virginia Tech in 1980 for work on parvovirus biology and then moved to University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill (1981-83) where he studied replication of vesicular stomatitis virus as a postdoc in Gail Wertz’s laboratory. He joined the faculty at the University of South Florida in 1983, where he began studies on rotavirus biology. Dr. Patton moved to the University of Miami School of Medicine in 1987 and then to the Laboratory of Infectious Diseases at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, NIH, in 1996, where he was Senior Investigator and Chief of the Rotavirus Molecular Biology Section. Dr. Patton moved to Indiana University in 2017, where he is now Professor and Associate Chair (Microbiology) in the Department of Biology and holds the Lawrence M. Blatt Chair of Virology. His group explores mechanisms used by rotavirus to replicate and package its segmented RNA genome and to suppress innate immune responses. Recent work includes examining the possible use of rotavirus as a vaccine expression platform.