Jon August Wellner was born in Portland, Oregon, in August 1945. He received his Bachelor's degree from the University of Idaho in 1968 and his PhD degree from the University of Washington in 1975. From 1975 until 1983 he was an Assistant Professor and Associate Professor at the University of Rochester. In 1983 he returned to the University of Washington, and has remained at the UW as a faculty member since that time. Over the course of a long and distinguished career, Jon has made seminal contributions to a variety of areas including empirical processes, semiparametric theory, and shape-constrained inference, and has co-authored a number of extremely influential books. He has been honored as the Le Cam lecturer by both the IMS (2015) and the French Statistical Society (2017). He is a Fellow of the IMS, the ASA, and the AAAS, and an elected member of the International Statistical Institute. He has served as co-Editor of Annals of Statistics (2001--2003) and Editor of Statistical Science (2010--2013), and President of IMS (2016--2017). In 2010 he was made a Knight of the Order of the Netherlands Lion. In his free time, Jon enjoys mountain climbing and backcountry skiing in the Cascades and British Columbia.