Profile: David J. Thomson, Ph.D.

Professor, Department of Mathematics and Statistics
Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Statistics and Signal Processing

Dr. David J. Thomson was born in Saint John, N.B., and is a graduate of Acadia University (Math and Physics) and the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn (MS and PhD in Electrical Engineering). He has worked at Bell Telephone Laboratories, Inc. on the WT4 Millimeter Waveguide System and the Advanced Mobile Phone Service project and was responsible for the circuit design of, and software for, a microprocessor-controlled modem for Rayleigh fading channels. He was also a Distinguished Member of Technical Staff in the Communications Analysis Research Department and a Green Scholar at Scripp's Institution of Oceanography. In addition to spectrum estimation his current research interests are analysis of global climate data and space physics. Dr. Thomson has taught courses at Princeton and Stanford, gave the Houghton lectures at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and in 2002 he became a Canada Research Chair in Statistics and Signal Processing in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at Queen's University.

Dr. Thomson's main research focus is in finding new analysis methods for time series, mostly in the frequency domain. The data sets that he works with are complex and often large, and the problems go from numerical analysis, special functions, linear algebra, and on to inverse theory. Many of the applications that he works on are in climate analysis, global warming, and space physics. The work that he did at Bell Labs is continuing on problems of dropped calls in cell phone systems. His Research Group is building a new solar radio telescope designed to operate within the communications bands, and attempting to make sense of the data from this will be a major challenge. Dr. Thomson has also done some work on astrophysics data, in particular looking at time delay estimates for gravitationally-lensed QSO's. (A QSO is a "quasi-stellar-object", formally defined as "a black hole having lunch".)

Dr. Thomson notes, "If it's not obvious, my career has been, and continues to be a lot of fun. One of the advantages of doing statistics is that it lets one play in a lot of different back yards - how many people get to play with data from cell phones, black holes, the Voyager and Ulysses spacecraft, plus seismology on both the earth and the sun?"

More information about Dr. David Thomson can be found on the Mathematics and Statistics website: http://www.mast.queensu.ca/~djt/, or on the Queen's Solar Radio Observatory site: