Jonathan was born in Columbus, Ohio. He received his BSE in Electrical Engineering from Princeton University in 2004, summa cum laude. He received his PhD in Applied Physics from Harvard University in 2010 under the supervision of Professor Federico Capasso, and his dissertation focused on the optical properties of self-assembled metallodielectric colloidal clusters. He continued as a postdoctoral researcher with Professor Capasso until 2011. Afterwards, he was a Beckman Institute Postdoctoral Fellow in Materials Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he researched epidermal-based stretchable electronics systems under the supervision of Professor John Rogers.