Dr. Jones is Scientist-in-charge of the USGS earthquake program in southern California heading the Pasadena office of the USGS, coordinating earthquake research funded by the USGS in southern California, and serving as a Director of the Southern California Earthquake Center.  She is a Commissioner of the California Seismic Safety Commission, which advises the governor and legislature on seismic safety, by appointment of Gov. Davis in 2002 and reappointment by Gov. Schwarzenegger in 2005 and serves on the California Earthquake Prediction Evaluation Council.  Dr. Jones has authored over 80 papers on research seismology with primary interest in the physics of earthquakes, foreshocks and earthquake hazard assessment, and the seismotectonics (earthquake-producing geologic structures) of southern California. She has been a seismologist with the US Geological Survey and a Visiting Research Associate at the Seismological Laboratory of Caltech since 1983.

She has received numerous awards, including the Alquist Award from the California Earthquake Safety Foundation, and Woman of the Year from the Muses of the California Science Museum . Dr. Jones received a Bachelor of Arts degree in Chinese Language and Literature, Magna Cum Laude, from Brown University in 1976 and a Ph. D. in geophysics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1981. She is a past Secretary of the Seismology Section of the American Geophysical Union, past Director and past Chair of the Publications Committee of the Seismological Society of America.  Dr. Jones, a fourth-generation resident of southern California, currently lives in La Cañada, California, with her husband, Egill Hauksson, also a seismologist, and their sons, Sven, age 19, and Niels, age 15.

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