John T. Minor received bachelor's degrees in Mathematics and Mathematical Science from Rice University in 1973. He earned his Ph.D. in computer science in 1979 from the University of Texas at Austin. He also held a postdoctoral fellowship in AI at the Rome Air Development Center in Rome, NY. Minor has conducted research into representation and deduction in Higher- order and Fuzzy Logics. Recently he has been researching techniques for designing better Programming Languages, especially for pedagogically-sound languages. His grants have been funded by, among others, ARO (Army Research Office), AFOSR (Air Force Office of Scientific Research), and NSF (National Science Foundation).

Minor has taught at UNLV for 35 years and served as the chairman of the Computer Science Department for 10 years (1990-93, 2005-12).