She is a professor emerita at the University of California, San Diego.
[1] In the early 1970s, Jones worked with David Aitken at University College London in the Physics and Astronomy Department, formed in 1972 from the merger of two separate departments.
[2] She completed her Ph.D. there in 1977,[3] under the supervision of Benjamin Michael Zuckerman[4], and was affiliated with the University of Minnesota before joining the University of California, San Diego in 1980.
[3] The research from later in her career included the development of a mid-infrared spectrometer for the W. M. Keck Observatory,[pub 5] and its use to observe the Einstein Cross, a gravitationally lensed quasar.
[pub 6] Jones was elected as a Fellow of the American Physical Society (APS) in 1994, after a nomination from the APS Division of Astrophysics, "for pioneering development of state-of-the-art infrared instrumentation, the design of the next generation of large telescopes, and their use to make forefront observations of infrared sources".