John Spouge is an award-winning researcher. Even as a student at St. George's, John distinguished himself as a talented mathematical mind. In Grade 11, he placed first in the Canadian Mathematical Olympiad. At UBC in 1973 he placed 7th in North America in the William Lowell Putnam Math Contest, and the UBC Putnam team composed of John, Mark Latham '70, and Bruce Neilson came second only to Caltech. John holds a BSc in Mathematics and MD, both from UBC, and a DPhil in Mathematics from Oxford University.

John has had many extracurricular interests. In 1979, with Julian Harrison '71, he climbed Mount Robson, which at 4,000 metres is the highest mountain in Canada outside the Yukon. In Michaelmas term of 1980, while a graduate student at Trinity College, Oxford, he helped mastermind the disappearance of the flag of a rival college, Balliol, from a tower 50 metres above street level and behind a locked door, and its replacement by a pillow-case with a large inked “T”. John then washed the flag and returned it anonymously to the Master of Balliol as a Christmas present. In 2004, he entertained Chinese tourists on a Yangtze River cruise ship with an a capella rendition of Stan Roger's "White Collar Holler".

Currently, John works for the US National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, where he is a founding member of the National Center for Biotechnology Information, or "NCBI". The NCBI was created to meet the challenges presented by the Human Genome Project, and it was the first organization specifically devoted to the biological specialties now known as bioinformatics and computational biology. John has collaborated extensively with AIDS researchers under Robert Gallo, co-discoverer of the AIDS antibody test, in developing mathematical models to evaluate potential AIDS therapies. Recently, he also contributed to efforts to catalogue all the plant species on the Earth.