Chris Jones took up his current position as Professor of Geographical Information Systems in the School of Computer Science & Informatics at Cardiff University in March 2000. He came from the University of Glamorgan, where he led the GIS Research Group in the School of Computing. Previously he held a University Lecturership in Cambridge, in the Department of Geography, and was a Fellow of Fitzwilliam College, having gone to Cambridge from an earlier period at Glamorgan between 1983 and 1992. Prior to that he was employed on geological computing applications at BP Exploration and at the British Geological Survey. He graduated in geology, from Bristol University, and received a PhD, from the School of Physics, University of Newcastle upon Tyne, for research on periodicities in fossil growth rhythms and the history of the Earth's rotation.

Research interests include various aspects of geographical information retrieval (GIR) including the development of geographical place ontologies, modelling of spatial language and spatio-textual indexing methods for spatially-aware web search engines ; multiscale spatial databases; environmental change detection; spatio-temporal data modelling; the computer reconstruction and visualisation of fossils; and automated cartographic design with regard to map generalisation and automated text placement. Work on the problem of cartographic text placement led to the development of the commercial cartographic program Maplex, which is now an ESRI product.