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 biometric recognition. He was a member of the US Defense Science Board and the US Forensics Science Standards Board. 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 (ACM), the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). He was elected to the US National Academy of Engineering, the Indian National Academy of Engineering and Chinese Academy of Sciences. Jain holds ten US patents and was named a Fellow of the National Academy of Inventors. Jain's work is focused on face and fingerprint recognition for secure authentication and national ID systems, e.g. India's Aadhaar. Jain received the BBVA Frontiers of Knowledge Award for ICT in 2025.