The goal of his research is to identify, clone, and characterize the evolution of genes underlying natural adaptations in order to determine the types of genes involved, how many, and what types of genetic changes occurred, and the evolutionary history of these changes. Jones received his PhD from the University of Rochester and completed a post-doctoral fellowship at the University of California at Davis. His lab aims to develop new methods relevant to the study of evolutionary genomics including theoretical, bioinformatic and statistical approaches. This particular research falls into three areas: (1) developing novel methods for assembling genomes using high-throughput DNA sequencing, (2) examining spatial patterns of DNA sequence evolution, and (3) detecting genetic changes due to natural selection.