Professor Ono earned his PhD from UCLA in 1993, and he has published several monographs and over 180 research and popular articles in number theory, combinatorics and algebra. Professor Ono has received many awards for his research, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Packard Fellowship and a Sloan Fellowship. He was awarded a Presidential Early Career Award for Science and Engineering (PECASE) by Bill Clinton in 2000 and he was named the National Science Foundation's Distinguished Teaching Scholar in 2005. He was also an associate producer of the 2016 Hollywood film The Man Who Knew Infinity, which starred Jeremy Irons and Dev Patel.