Science Board members

Professor Jenny Thomas

(Science Board Chair)

Professor Jenny Thomas is Professor of Particle Physics, University College London. A graduate from London University and with a D.Phil from Oxford University in B-quark decays from electron positron collisions at the PETRA accelerator at DESY (Germany), Prof. Thomas worked on experiments at several accelerator laboratories around the world before joining the UCL HEP group in 1996. She worked on Higgs and WIMP searches and indirect Top mass measurements at LEP (CERN); on WW scattering at the SSC (Texas); and most recently on the measurement of neutrino oscillations at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (U.S).

She has played a key role in the MINOS experiment, an international collaboration of 150 scientists, presently holding the position of Deputy Spokesperson. She pioneered the measurement of the neutrino oscillation parameters from this experiment that are now known to the world’s best precision of 10%. The result of this measurement confirmed the hypothesis that neutrinos have a non-zero mass. She is also presently involved in the SuperNEMO project that will search for neutrinoless double beta decay and possibly shed light on the fundamental nature of the neutrino.

She has contributed to the hardware development of all the above experiments with a range of expertise spanning data acquisition firmware and software, precision wire and pad chamber design, construction and data reconstruction, photo detector characterization, precision calibration and scintillator calorimetry.

She has held several key advisory positions over the last decade, most notably the Chair of PPARC’s Science Committee, and is presently Chair of the STFC’s Science Board, the top level scientific advisory board for STFC. In parallel, Prof. Thomas has worked within the Knowledge Exchange directorate, specifically organizing a new approach (PNPAS challenge led scheme) to exploiting scientific knowledge exchange within STFC.