Jonathan is Professor of Epigenetics at the University of Exeter Medical School and also heads the Psychiatric Epigenetics group at the Institute of Psychiatry, King's College London. He graduated with a degree in Human Sciences from Oxford University, where he took a particular interest in cannibalism, before undertaking his PhD in psychiatric genetics at the Institute of Psychiatry.

After spending three years as a Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) postdoctoral fellow at the University of Toronto, he returned to the Institute of Psychiatry to establish the Psychiatric Epigenetics group in the MRC Social, Genetic and Developmental Psychiatry Centre.

He was appointed as Professor of Epigenetics at UEMS in September 2012.