John Helmann earned bachelor`s degrees in Chemistry and Biology (University of California, Santa Cruz) in 1982. He then joined the Department of Biochemistry at the University of California at Berkeley where he studied bacterial RNA polymerase with Dr. Michael Chamberlin and earned a Ph.D. in 1987. From 1987 to 1990, Dr. Helmann worked as a post-doctoral fellow with Dr. Christopher T. Walsh at the Harvard Medical School. His post-doctoral research, on the regulation of bacterial mercuric ion resistance determinants, was supported by the Jane Coffin Childs Memorial Medical Research Foundation. Dr. Helmann joined the Section of Microbiology at Cornell as an Assistant Professor in 1990 and joined the graduate field of Biochemistry, Molecular, and Cell Biology in 1991. He was promoted to Associate Professor in 1996 and Professor in 2002.