Jennifer Trainer Thompson

A journalist for over 20 years, Jennifer writes about topics that interest her – science, food, travel, art, and lifestyle – for The New York Times, Travel & Leisure, Omni, Discover, Harvard Magazine among others, and has garnered a reputation for sniffing out trends. She wrote the first objective book on the commercial nuclear power controversy (Nuclear Power: Both Sides), and co-authored a popular book about scientists’ quest for the unified field theory (Beyond Einstein) when the superstring theory was proposed in 1987. She wrote the first national story about the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA) for The New York Times in 1987, and was so taken by the idea of establishing a contemporary art museum in an abandoned mill complex in a small New England city that she asked the fledgling institution’s founding director Joseph Thompson for a job. Thompson hired her to become MASS MoCA’s founding development director, and several years later married her. She and her husband Joe live in western Massachusetts with their two children.