John F. Conley, Jr. earned his B.S. in electrical engineering in 1991 and Ph.D. in engineering science and mechanics in 1995 from The Pennsylvania State University where he won a 1996 Xerox Prize for his Ph.D. dissertation.

He was at Dynamics Research Corporation from 1995 to 2000 and at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory from 2000-2001, where he received an achievement award. In 2001, he became a senior member of the technical staff at Sharp Laboratories of America (SLA) and from 2005-2007 was leader of the Novel Materials and Devices Group. In 2002-03, he served as an adjunct professor at the Vancouver campus of Washington State University. Since 2007 he has been at Oregon State University where is a professor in both the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science as well as the Intercollege Materials Science Program, an ONAMI signature faculty fellow, and co-director of the Materials Synthesis and Characterization (MASC) facility.

Conley has served as a guest editor for three special issues of IEEE Transactions on Device and Material Reliability and has served on the technical and management committees of the American Vacuum Society, the MRS Electronic Materials Conference, IEEE Nano, IEEE IRPS, the IEEE SOI Conference, and the IEEE Nuclear and Space Radiation Effects Conference, was technical program chair of the IEEE Microelectronics Reliability and Qualification Workshop, and general program chair of the IEEE International Integrated Reliability Workshop. He has authored or co-authored over 120 technical papers, over 130 additional conference presentations (including tutorial short courses on high-k dielectrics and 15 invited talks), and 20 U.S. patents, which together have received more than 2,800 citations.

Conley is a Fellow of the IEEE and the American Vacuum Society (AVS).