He was a Professor Emeritus in computer science at University of Copenhagen.

His work spanned both programming languages and the theory of computation.

[2] Within the theory of computation, he was among the pioneers of the study of Log-space reductions and P-completeness.

[3] Neil D. Jones was a Knight of the Order of the Dannebrog (since 1998) and also a member of the Academia Europaea (since 1999).

He was a 1998 Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery for "outstanding contributions to semantics-directed compilation, especially partial evaluation, and to the theory of computation, formal models and their practical realization".