Thandi Lewin is currently working in the Department of Higher Education and Training (DHET) coordinating the development of a National Plan for Post-School Education and Training. The post is a secondment from JET Education Services, where she was responsible for Monitoring and Evaluation. She has previously worked at a senior level in government, and in the non-profit, university, and philanthropic sectors. Her work has broadly been in the field of higher-education policy and education and social justice. 

Her research focuses on the impact of gender on academic working lives, career development choices, and professional identities of early-career academics and on how early-career academic women understand, experience, and mediate gendered institutional environments. The work is guided by a policy interest in why gender inequalities persist in universities, and what can be done to attract (and retain) new generations of academics into South African universities. The study is using the capabilities approach, combined with gender theorisation to analyse the gendered working lives, career development aspirations, and professional identities of a small group of early-career academic women at one South African university.