Dame Jean Olwen Thomas, DBE FRS FMedSci MAE FLSW (born 1 October 1942) is a Welsh biochemist, former Master of St Catharine's College, Cambridge,[4] and Chancellor of Swansea University.
She continued her education at University College of Swansea where she received a first class Bachelor of Science degree in chemistry in 1964 followed by a PhD in 1967.
[6] She then served as a member of the university academic staff as well as a Fellow of New Hall, now Murray Edwards College, where she acted as vice president from 1983 to 1987.
Elected by the president and fellows of the college, she remained master until 2016, when she was succeeded by Professor Sir Mark Welland.
[8] A scholarship fund called the Jean Thomas PhD Award was created in her honour by alumnus of St. Catharine's Peter Dawson.
[7] Her career as a biochemist has been heavily focused on studying the structure and dynamics of chromatin and its role in the repression and activation of genes via regulatory proteins.
She was the first person to isolate and characterize the histone octamer, which ultimately and led to the universal nucleosome model for chromatin structure formulated by Roger D. Kornberg.
In 2007, her research team used NMR mapping to better define the negative regulation of the HMGB1-DNA interaction that was suspected to be largely controlled by the acidic tail of HMGB1.
[18] Recently, she studied proteins from Drosophila melanogaster and maize that are analogous to HMGB1 in order to describe a simpler, general mechanism of the self-inhibitive behavior of the DNA-binding regions of the HMG-boxes in HMGB1.