Jon Bloch received his Ph.D. in geological sciences from University of Michigan and spent a year there as an NSF-funded postdoctoral fellow, followed by two years as a research fellow at the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology. In 2004 he joined the faculty at the Florida Museum of Natural History. A Research Foundation Professor at the University of Florida, Bloch studies fossil vertebrates from the Cenozoic with an emphasis on addressing questions surrounding the first appearance and early evolution of the modern orders of mammals. Field research has taken him to the Cenozoic of Wyoming and Montana, the Cerrejón and Bogotá formations of northern Colombia, and the exposures along the Panama Canal. Bloch has been an associate editor of the Journal of Human Evolution, is on the editorial board of the Journal of Mammalian Evolution and is co-editor of the journal Paleobiology.