Jha is a leading expert in computer engineering. His research interests are at the intersection of high-performance distributed computing and computational and data-driven science. Jha was the chair of the Computation and Data-Driven Discovery Division at Brookhaven National Laboratory. He is also a computer engineering professor at Rutgers University. 

Jha has a master’s degree in physics from the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, as well as a master’s degree and a doctorate in computer science from Syracuse University. In 2016, Jha received the Chancellor’s Excellence in Research award for his work on cyber infrastructure work. This is the highest award for research contributions bestowed to Rutgers faculty. He is also a recipient of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers’ International Scalable Computing Challenge (SCALE) 2018 award and the National Science Foundation’s Faculty Early Career Development Program award. In 2020, Jha won one of the top awards in high-performance computing, the Association for Computing Machinery Gordon Bell Prize.