Jean Bertoin was born in Lyon (France) in 1961. He entered the École Normale Supérieure of St. Cloud in 1980 and earned a PhD from the Pierre-and-Marie-Curie University in 1987 under the supervision of Marc Yor. From 1986 to 1988, he taught at a high school in Mexico, forging deep ties with the country.

In 1988, he became a Researcher at CNRS, and in 1992 he was appointed Professor at Pierre-and-Marie-Curie University. He also taught at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris for 8 years. In 2011, he joined the University of Zurich.

He is a specialist in probability theory, particularly in Lévy processes, Brownian motion, and branching processes. In the early 2000s, he became interested in fragmentation processes, followed by fragmentation with growth. In recent years, his research has focused on certain reinforced random processes.

Among the distinctions he has received are the CNRS Bronze Medal (1992), the Rollo-Davidson Prize (1996), and the Thérèse Gautier Prize (Académie des Sciences, 2015). He was an invited speaker at the ICM (2002) and ECM (2012), and elected a corresponding member of the Mexican Academy of Sciences in 2011.