Jain earned his PhD in 1973 from The Ohio State University, USA. He is Distinguished Professor at Michigan State University. His area of research includes pattern recognition, machine learning, computer vision and biometrics. He was a member of Defense Science Board and of the Forensics Science Standards Board, both US institutions. He was a recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship, the Humboldt Research Award, the Fulbright Fellowship and the King-Sun Fu Prize. He was Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence and is a fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and SPIE, the international society for optics and photonics. He is a member of the US National Academy of Engineering and a Foreign Fellow of the Indian National Academy of Engineering. Jain holds eight patents, US and Korean, and was named a fellow of the National Academy of Inventors. Jain and his students' work is focused on unconstrained face recognition and the development of fingerprint matching solutions, which have applications.