Jonathan Blakely was born and raised in Durham, North Carolina. He attended college at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, and earned a Ph. D. in physics from Duke University in 2003. He has been a research physicist at the U. S. Army's Aviation and Missile Research, Development, and Engineering Center in Huntsville, Alabama since 2005. Additionally, from 2011 to 2015 he served as an adjunct assistant professor of physics at the University of Alabama in Huntsville. He has authored more than 60 peer-reviewed papers, as well as four book chapters, on nonlinear dynamics and chaos.