Dayton Jones grew up in Philadelphia and attended Carleton College (BS in Astronomy, 1974), UC Santa Barbara (MS in Scientific Instrumentation, 1976) and Cornell University (MS in Astronomy, 1979, and PhD in Astronomy, 1981). Following graduate school he was a postdoc with the VLBI group at Caltech, then an NRC postdoc at JPL. He joined the JPL staff in 1986 and worked there until joining SSI in 2015, retiring from JPL as a Principal Scientist. His research interests center on high resolution radio imaging and astrometry using interferometry. His other interests include hiking and skiing.