Rate My Professor Jenni Adams

Professor Jenni Adams holds the position of Professor in the School of Physical and Chemical Sciences within the Faculty of Science at the University of Canterbury. She earned a BSc (Hons) from the University of Canterbury and a DPhil in theoretical physics from the University of Oxford in 1995, with her doctoral thesis titled Cosmological phase transitions: techniques and phenomenology. Following her doctorate, she conducted postdoctoral research in cosmology at Uppsala University. In 1998, Adams joined the University of Canterbury as a lecturer in the Department of Physics and Astronomy, progressing to full professor in 2020. She serves as New Zealand's lead scientist in the IceCube Neutrino Observatory collaboration, a cubic-kilometer detector embedded in Antarctic ice that observes high-energy astrophysical neutrinos.

Adams specializes in astroparticle physics and cosmology, with research interests encompassing high-energy cosmic rays, dark matter, and neutrino astrophysics. She leads the Astroparticle Physics Group at the University of Canterbury and supervises postgraduate students on projects such as IceTop searches for high-energy cosmic rays, machine learning for IceCube data analysis, and searches for Galactic PeVatrons. Her contributions include over 900 publications, amassing more than 55,000 citations. Key works feature Evidence for high-energy extraterrestrial neutrinos at the IceCube detector (Science, 2013), Observation of high-energy astrophysical neutrinos in three years of IceCube data (Physical Review Letters, 2014), and An absence of neutrinos associated with cosmic-ray acceleration in γ-ray bursts (Nature, 2012). Adams has received the Dan Walls Medal from the New Zealand Institute of Physics in 2021, the first woman to do so, and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society Te Apārangi (FRSNZ) in 2023. She advises on the Rhodes Scholarship, holds positions on editorial boards including Universe, and delivers public lectures on neutrino astronomy.