James R. Thompson (statistician)
James Robert Thompson was an American statistician.
Born on June 18, 1938, Thompson studied chemical engineering at Vanderbilt University before pursuing graduate studies in math at Princeton University. Upon earning a Ph.D, Thompson returned to teach at Vanderbilt for three years. He then joined the faculty of Indiana University before moving to Rice University in 1970. Thompson was named a full professor in 1977, and chaired the department of statistics twice, from 1987 to 1990 and again between 1993 and 1996. In 2000, he became the Noah Harding Professor of Statistics. While a member of Vanderbilt's faculty, Thompson also worked at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center and School of Public Health as an adjunct professor. Thompson's research interests included computational finance, biomathematics, and mathematical modeling of HIV/AIDS and cancer. He retired from Rice in 2016, and died at the age of 79 on December 4, 2017.
