[1][2][3][4][5][6] Kernan won a post-doctoral scholarship at the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory at the University of California at Berkeley.

[1][2][7][8][6] In 1983, Kernan worked with Professor Carlo Rubbia and Dr Simon van der Meer.

She led the US team on the CERN international Nobel-prize winning experiment to discover the two sub-atomic particles, W and Z bosons.

She had been working as part of the DZero experiment at the Tevatron collider at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory near Chicago since 1986.

[1][2][9][6] When Kernan retired she moved to Danvers, Massachusetts to live with her sister and then to Panama City Beach in Florida where she died in 2020.