Jon Huntsman is an inventor, entrepreneur, and philanthropist. Huntsman is Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of the Huntsman group of companies, the largest privately-held producer of petrochemicals in the nation.

Born in Blackfoot, Idaho, Huntsman graduated from Palo Alto (California) High School. He subsequently attended the Wharton School of Finance at the University of Pennsylvania on a Zellerbach scholarship, where he graduated at the top of his class in 1959. After two years in the U.S. Navy, Huntsman earned an MBA from the University of Southern California. He has subsequently been awarded thirteen honorary doctorate degrees at various universities.

Employed by Olson Brothers, Inc. an egg-producing company in Los Angeles, he helped develop the first plastic egg carton. In 1967 Huntsman was appointed president of Dow Chemical Company's Dolco Packaging in Southern California, a joint venture with Olson Brothers, a position he left to serve under President Nixon as special assistant to the President and White House staff secretary. He later founded Huntsman Container Co. where in 1974 he created the "clamshell" container for McDonald's Big Mac and developed other popular plastic fast-food container products in rigid plastics and foam. In 1980 he sold Huntsman Container to Keys Fiber and took a three-year sabbatical to serve his church.

Re-entering the plastics industry in 1983, he purchased Shell Chemical's polystyrene plant in Belpre, Ohio which he expanded and added to through acquisitions in the U.S. and abroad, to found Huntsman Chemical Corporation, which quickly became a major world participant in the production of polystyrene and styrene monomer. Additional acquisitions from Shell and Elf Atochem in France in the late 1980s and 1990s, together with a joint-venture purchase of Texaco Chemical Co., expanded Huntman's global presence, including a plastics packaging plant in Gorlovka, Ukraine. In 1994 Huntsman Chemical became the Huntsman Corporation which became a publicly traded company in 2005. With executive offices in Salt Lake City, Huntsman also has operations at 38 sites in 14 countries, manufacturing approximately 5 billion pounds of petrochemical products each year and employing over 5,000 people.

Huntsman is a leading philanthropist in the United States who has contributed millions of dollars to engineering education in the plastics industry, as well as worldwide humanitarian programs for the handicapped and the homeless. Huntsman and his wife, Karen, founded the Huntsman Cancer Institute in 1995 which is now one of America's major cancer research centers dedicated to finding a cure for cancer with a state-of-the-art cancer specialty hospital.

His service to the Mormon Church has also been significant. Huntsman serves on numerous corporate, civic, and cultural boards. He is formerly vice chairman, United States Chamber of Commerce, and chairman of the Utah Symphony Orchestra. He is a member of the Board of Trustees for the University of Pennsylvania, and an overseer for the Wharton School. Huntsman was inducted in the Plastics Hall of Fame in 1994.

See: "Jon Meade Huntsman," Wikipedia