David J. Thomson

Dr. David J. Thomson is a Professor in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics, and a Canada Research Chair in Statistics and Signal Processing. He is a Professional Engineer in the province of Ontario, a Fellow of the IEEE, a Chartered Statistician and Fellow of the Royal Statistical Society, a Member of the American Statistical Association and the American Geophysical Union and a 2009 Killam Fellow (administered through the Canada Council for the Arts).

He is best known for creation of the multitaper method of spectral estimation, first published in complete form in 1982 in a special issue of Proceedings of the IEEE. He has published over 100 peer-reviewed journal articles on topics as broad as space physics, climatology and paleoclimatology, statistics, and global warming. It was his 1995 paper that first conclusively showed the relationship between atmospheric CO₂ and global temperature.

Career

David Thomson joined the Technical Staff at Bell Labs in 1965, where he was assigned to work on the WT4 Millimeter Waveguide System and the Advanced Mobile Phone Service project. In 1983 he was reassigned to the Communications Analysis Research Department where he remained as a Distinguished Member until his retirement in 2001. During this time period he was

• a Member of the Panel on Sensors and Electron Devices of the Army Research Laboratory Technical Assessment Board
• Chairman of Commission C of USNC-URSI
• Associate editor for Radio Science
• Associate editor for Communications Theory and for Detection and Estimation of the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory
• Adjunct professor in the Graduate Department of Scripps Institution of Oceanography
• Consulted at the Neurological Institute of Columbia University
• Visiting Professor at Princeton University (statistical inference)
• Visiting Professor at Stanford University (time series)
• Guest Lecturer at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (the Houghton lectures)
• Participant at the Isaac Newton Institute at the University of Cambridge.

Upon his retirement from Bell Labs, Dr. Thomson took a Canada Research Chair at Queen's University at Kingston, where he has remained to this date.

Bibliography

• Thomson, David J. (1982), "Spectrum estimation and harmonic analysis", Proceedings of the IEEE: 1055–1096, http://omidi.iut.ac.ir/SDR/2010/Fazeli_Hashemizadeh/reference/1456701_2.pdf .
• Thomson, David J. (1997), "Dependence of global temperatures on atmospheric CO2 and solar irradiance", Proceedings of the National Academy of Science: 8370–8377, http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/abstract/94/16/8370 .

External links

• Personal Academic Page
• Spotlight