John Charles Howell received his BS in Physics in 1995 from Utah State University, and his MS and PhD in Physics in 2000 from Pennsylvania State University, USA. He then took a postdoctoral research position at the Centre for Quantum Computation at the University of Oxford, UK. Howell joined the University of Rochester, USA, in 2002 as Assistant Professor of Physics. He was made Professor of Physics in 2011. Currently, he is a professor at the Racah Institute of Physics at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel.

Howell received a Research Innovation Award from the Research Corporation in 2004, a Presidential PECASE Award in 2005, and the Adolph Lomb Medal in 2006 "for innovative contributions in quantum optics, particularly aspects of quantum cloning, violations of Bell's inequalities and maximal photonic entanglement." He is an Optica Fellow and the Vice President for Optical Society to the International Commission for Optics.