His father, James Thomas Jenkins, was the head the mathematics department of Jarvis Collegiate Institute.
[2] Jenkins moved from Toronto to the United States to attend graduate school in mathematics at Harvard University.
[3] There he received his PhD in 1948 with thesis Some Problems in Complex Analysis under the supervision Lars Ahlfors, one of the first two Fields laureates.
[4] After some time at Harvard as a postdoc, Jenkins taught and did research at Johns Hopkins University for several years.
[7][8][9][10][11][12] In their 1953 paper in Fundamenta Mathematicae, "Morse and Jenkins solve the difficult problem of showing that on a simply connected Riemann surface every pseudo-harmonic function has a pseudo-conjugate.