She received her bachelor's degree in 1932 from Goucher College and continued to pursue her medical career at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.

[2] As a resident at Johns Hopkins, she discovered that the common pregnancy hormone, human chorionic gonadotropin, hCG was produced by the placenta, not the pituitary gland as originally thought.

In 1949, Jones made the first description of Luteal Phase Dysfunction, and is credited to be the first in using progesterone to treat women with a history of miscarriages, thus allowing many of them to not only conceive, but to deliver healthy babies.

[5][7] She became the director of Johns Hopkins' Laboratory of Reproductive Physiology and was the Gynecologist-in-Charge of the hospital's gynecologic endocrinology clinic in 1939.

[7] She demonstrated that stimulation of menopausal gonadotropin leads to the increase in number of eggs that are available and viable for vitro fertilization.

[8] In 1978, the same year that UK scientists were successful with in vitro fertilization, the Joneses took an opportunity from EVMS and moved to Norfolk, Virginia to create an IVF program in the United States.

On December 28, 1981, their procedure gave birth to Elizabeth Jordan Carr, the first American test tube baby.