Peyton Jones graduated from Trinity College, Cambridge in 1980, and worked in industry for two years before serving as a lecturer at University College London and (from 1990-1998) as a professor at the University of Glasgow, where he subsequently served as Head of the Department of Computer Science. Since 1998 he has worked as a researcher at Microsoft Research in Cambridge, England. He is married to Dorothy, a priest in the Church of England, and they have three children. In 2004 he was inducted as a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery.