He is Kenan Distinguished Professor of Biology[1] at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and has a joint appointment with the Department of Pharmacology in the UNC School of Medicine.
In the middle of his PhD program, Jones spent 2 years at the Friedrich Miescher Institute in Basal Switzerland under the mentorship of Fred Meins.
During his postdoctoral training, Jones established that the plant photoreceptor, phytochrome A, is dimeric and he showed a minimal structural unit for photoperception.
This worked continued into his early years at the University of North Carolina and directed subsequent structure analyses of phytochrome by other labs.
During the 1970s, in collaboration with the organic chemist Nelson Leonard, Jones invented a photoaffinity labeling technique [3] to identify auxin receptors in plant extracts.