Jon is the G. Lawton and Louise G. Johnson Professor of Engineering and also Professor of Industrial and Operations Engineering, in the College of Engineering at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He is an Affiliate of CHEPS (The Center for Healthcare Engineering and Patient Safety), MIDAS (Michigan Institute for Data Science), MCAIM (Michigan Center for Applied and Interdisciplinary Mathematics), and of MICDE (Michigan Institute for Computational Discovery and Engineering).

Jon earned his B.S. (1981), M.S. (1984) and Ph.D. (1986) degrees at Cornell University. His dissertation supervisor was Bob Bland of Cornell's Operations Research Department. Jon spent 1985-1993 on the faculty of Yale University and 1993-2000 on the Mathematics Department faculty of the University of Kentucky, in the Discrete Mathematics Group. Jon was at the T.J. Watson Research Center of the IBM Corporation during 2000-2011, where he managed the Mathematical Programming group in the Mathematical Sciences Department. He was a research visitor at the Center for Operations Research and Econometrics, Université catholique de Louvain, in Belgium, for the academic years 1991-1992 and 1999-2000, an Adjunct Professor in the Industrial Engineering and Operations Research Department at Columbia University in 2003, and an Adjunct Professor at the Leonard N. Stern School of Business, New York University (2002-2010). Jon was Chair of the Executive Committee of the Mathematical Optimization Society for 2008-2010, Chair of the INFORMS Optimization Society for 2010-2012, Vice-Chair for Integer Programming of the Optimization Section of INFORMS for 1999-2001 (and Optimization Section Council member for 1999-2003). He was the founding Managing Editor of the journal Discrete Optimization, (2004-2006) and Editor-in-Chief of the journal Mathematical Programming, Series A (2018-2021). Jon was awarded the ICS (INFORMS Computing Society) Prize in 2010. In 2013, he was elected as a Fellow of INFORMS.

Currently, Jon is Editorial Board Member of the journal Optimization and Engineering, and Editorial Board Member of the journal Discrete Applied Mathematics. Jon is a Permanent Member of DIMACS, and a Full Member of the COIN-OR Foundation.