Jonathan N. Katz's interests lie at the intersection of political science, economics, and statistics. His research focuses primarily on the development of statistical methods for the social sciences and their empirical applications, particularly to elections and other public policy questions. Katz is the Deputy Editor for Social Sciences at Science Advances, the open access journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and he was previously the co-editor of Political Analysis, the journal of the Society for Political Methodology, for eight years. He also previously served as co-director of the Caltech/MIT Voting Technology Project, and he was the Chair of the Division of Humanities and Sciences at Caltech for seven years (2007–2014).

In addition to his academic work, Katz has been involved in a number of start-up companies and has a long-standing statistical consulting practice focused primarily on providing expertise in election law cases. He has been involved in more than 50 cases in both state and Federal court over two decades, including several that were ultimately decided by the U.S. Supreme Court.

Katz is an elected fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and an inaugural fellow of the Society for Political Methodology. He received his S.B. in applied mathematics from MIT and his Ph.D. jointly in economics and political science at the University of California, San Diego. He was a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University and was previously on the faculty of the University of Chicago.