She successfully completed her entrance exam in Oxford, receiving her bachelor's degree in chemistry in 1953 and later earning her doctorate under Dorothy Hodgkin.

[1] By the end of 1955, she was involved in the X-ray structural analysis of corrin ring from vitamin B12, for which Hodgkin was awarded the 1964 Nobel Prize in Chemistry; Glusker earned her doctorate in 1957.

They married in 1955 in the United States and went together as post-doctoral researchers to Caltech, where Jenny Glusker worked in the laboratory of Linus Pauling.

After Patterson died in November 1966, Glusker eventually took over his lab and became a junior faculty member at the Institute for Cancer Research.

[3] At the ICR, Glusker initially examined the structure of small molecules of the citric acid cycle, in particular aconitase-catalyzed citrate, and its conformation as a ligand to iron atoms of the iron-sulfur cluster of aconitase, which led to a better understanding of the three-dimensional structure and mechanism of the enzymes (ferrous-wheel mechanism).