John Stelling received his M.P.H. from Johns Hopkins University School of Hygiene and Public Health in 1987, and his M.D. from Harvard Medical School in 1991. He served as a medical officer for the World Health Organization's Department of Communicable Diseases Surveillance and Response from 1996-1999. He is a consultant for the U.S. Department of Agriculture, National Antimicrobial Resistance Monitoring System.

He is developer of the WHONET software, currently used to manage microbiological data on bacterial populations from over 1,100 hospital, public health, food, and veterinary laboratories in approximately 90 countries.