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Jay Marx was educated in the public schools in New York City and received his undergraduate and graduate education at Columbia University leading to a PhD in high energy physics in 1970. Following a period on the faculty at Yale University, he joined the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) in 1975. In 2006 he joined the California institute of Technology as the former Executive Director of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory (LIGO).

At LBNL Jay served as Project Director for the construction of the Advanced Light Source, a world-class facility providing x-rays for basic and applied research.

During the 1990’s, Jay directed an international scientific and engineering team that designed and constructed the STAR experiment to study matter under conditions that existed in the first microsecond after the big bang.

As LIGO Laboratory Executive Director, Jay oversaw the construction of Advanced LIGO, the instrument that made the Nobel Prize-winning historic first direct observation of gravitational waves in 2015. Jay is a Fellow of the American Physical Society, and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Since retirement from LIGO in 2011, Jay serves as advisor to a number of big science experiments and projects.