Nešetřil received his Ph.D. from Charles University in 1973 under the supervision of Aleš Pultr and Gert Sabidussi.

Jaroslav Nešetřil is Editor in Chief of Computer Science Review[3] and INTEGERS: the Electronic Journal of Combinatorial Number Theory.

[6] He was awarded the state prize (1985 jointly with Vojtěch Rödl) for a collection of papers in Ramsey theory.

[7] Nešetřil is a corresponding member of the German Academy of Sciences since 1996 and has been declared Doctor Honoris Causa of the University of Alaska (Fairbanks) in 2002.

He has also been declared Doctor Honoris Causa of the University of Bordeaux 1 in 2009; the speech he made in French at this occasion attracted a great deal of attention.