Professor Jennifer Thomas has been inducted as an Honorary Fellow of Royal Holloway, University of London, in recognition of her extraordinary contribution to particle physics and her enduring impact on the scientific community.
The honorary fellowship was conferred by Professor Julie Sanders, Vice-Chancellor and Principal of Royal Holloway, at a graduation ceremony on Thursday 18 July 2024.
After receiving a BSc in Physics from Bedford College, University of London - one of Royal Holloway’s founding Colleges – in 1981, Professor Thomas went on to receive a Doctor of Philosophy in Particle Physics from the University of Oxford in 1983.
She subsequently worked at Imperial College, as well as acting as a CERN fellow between 1985 and 1989. Professor Thomas moved to the Max Planck Institute in Munich, followed by followed by a position as a Staff Scientist at the Superconducting Super Collider Laboratory in Dallas, Texas.
Professor Thomas returned to Oxford in 1994, working on the MINOS proposed experiment, which she brought to University College London in 1997. She was awarded a CBE in 2011 and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2017. In 2018, she was the winner of the Institute of Physics’ Michael Faraday Medal.