Eric Jones is the founder, chairman and chief executive of Enthought, a scientific software and AI firm in Austin, Texas, and one of the people who started the scientific Python community in the early 2000s. He helped launch the open-source SciPy library in 2001 and helped organize the first SciPy conference the following year (SciPy '02 report).
Electromagnetics Research at Duke
He earned a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering at Baylor University, then a master’s and a doctorate in electrical engineering at Duke University, where his research covered numerical electromagnetics and genetic optimization (Enthought). He stayed on at Duke for postdoctoral research, and Enthought traces its start to what he found there: Python’s scientific tools could solve hard problems in his own work (Enthought).
Starting Enthought and SciPy
He founded Enthought in 2001 with Travis Vaught. Travis Oliphant, who later created NumPy, recalled on the Contributor podcast that the two called him as they were starting the company, came up with the name SciPy and proposed merging modules Jones had written with code from Oliphant and Pearu Peterson into one package (Contributor).
The first SciPy conference, held at Caltech in Pasadena, California, in September 2002, drew roughly 70 attendees, mostly from government labs, universities and research institutes. Enthought was a major organizer, and Jones was one of three Enthought staff who presented there (SciPy '02 report).
Bringing AI to Corporate Research Labs
Under Jones, Enthought builds machine learning and data software for research groups in materials, chemicals, semiconductors and life sciences, and it has worked in Japan since 2018. When the company appointed Toshio Mii, a former AWS and IBM executive, to lead its Japanese business in April 2026, Jones said the appointment reflected “our confidence in the extraordinary opportunity ahead as AI reshapes how scientific research is done” (Enthought).