Jenny Thomas is known for her pioneering work in high-energy particle physics. In particular, Jenny has made major contributions to the study of neutrinos. She is a leader in the development and analysis of neutrino oscillation measurements. Since 2010 she has led the international MINOS collaboration at Fermilab, near Chicago. She has extended the scope of this experiment to search for sterile neutrinos over a world leading range.

She has played a leading role in detector development, pushing novel applications of and innovations in tracking detectors and very recently a system to apply mobile technology to photon detector readout.

Jenny is now engaged in building a small (10 kiloton, 20 people) water Cherenkov detector that will be submerged in a flooded mine pit in the path of the Fermilab neutrino beam. Its aim is to demonstrate that a megaton neutrino detector is within financial reach of today’s uncertain budgets. In 2012, she was awarded a CBE for services to science and was elected as a fellow to the American Physical Society.