Jonathan Dickey attended The University of Texas at Austin where he completed a Bachelor of Science in Ecology, Evolution, and Behavior. After a multi-agency internship with the U.S. National Park Service and U.S. Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management, Jonathan began pursuing a Ph.D at The University of Tennessee, Knoxville in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. There, his research investigated the small-scale distribution of plant-host associated microorganisms and the ecological factors that govern these distributions.

Currently, he is a post-doctoral scholar in the Jackrel Lab at the University of California San Diego, where he uses multi'omics strategies to investigate microbial succession and metabolism as the mechanistic links between host-microbe interactions in freshwater rivers. Further, he asks how these interactions can scale up and regulate ecosystem processes and patterns, such as the Home-Field Advantage phenomenon found in leaf litter decomposition. He also uses novel statistical approaches to analyze the effect spatiotemporal factors have on our interpretations of microbial community assembly and diversity.