[5] She was previously at the US Geological Survey from 1985 to 2016, where she conducted research in the areas of foreshocks, seismotectonics, and the application of hazards science to improve societal resilience after natural disasters.

Jones received a Bachelor of Arts degree in Chinese language and literature, magna cum laude, from Brown University in 1976 and a Ph.D. in geophysics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1981.

[8] She visited China in February 1979 in order to study the 1975 Haicheng earthquake, which had apparently been successfully predicted by the Chinese authorities based on an analysis of its foreshock sequence.

[11] Jones served as the Science Advisor for Risk Reduction for the USGS Natural Hazards Mission Area, as part of the SAFRR Project.

[2] In January 2014, she entered into a partnership on behalf of the USGS with the City of Los Angeles to serve as Seismic Risk Advisor to Mayor Eric Garcetti.

[16] In the book, Jones chronicles some of the world's greatest natural disasters, such as volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, floods, and hurricanes, and analyzes how people have responded to them in order to understand how future crises can be survived.

[20] Public perception of Jones as a voice of calm and reassurance has been attributed, in part, to an incident following the 1992 Joshua Tree earthquake in which she answered press questions while holding her sleeping child in her arms.

[9] In 2014, Jones was embedded at Los Angeles City Hall, a move by the USGS that Caltech's Tom Heaton credited with the September 2015 passage of a retrofitting plan that would increase seismic survivability of over 15,000 structures largely built of soft first story and non-ductile concrete.