Biographical Information

Elizabeth A. Thompson (PhD Cambridge, 1974) received a B.A. in Mathematics (1970), a Diploma in Mathematical Statistics (1971), and Ph.D. in Statistics (1974), from Cambridge University, UK. In 1974-75 she was a NATO/SRC postdoc in the Department of Genetics, Stanford University. From 1975-81 she was a Fellow of King's College, Cambridge, and from 1981-85 was Fellow and Director of Studies in Mathematics at Newnham College. From 1976-85 she was a University Lecturer in the Department of Pure Mathematics and Mathematical Statistics, University of Cambridge. She joined the faculty of the University of Washington in December 1985, as a Professor of Statistics. At the University of Washington, Dr. Thompson was Chair of the Department of Statistics from 1989-94. Dr. Thompson's research interest is in the development of methods for inference from genetic data, and particularly from data observed on large and complex pedigree structures. Questions of interest range from analyses of long-term gene frequency differentiation in widely dispersed populations, to short-term extinction of genes in the small population of a highly endangered species; from inference of genealogical relationships among individuals to inference of the genetic basis of traits from data observed on members of a known pedigree; and from analyses of patterns of genome sharing in plants to modern methods for human linkage analysis. In recent years, several of these questions have been addressed using Monte Carlo likelihood.

In 1981, Elizabeth Thompson was elected a member of the International Statistical Institute, and in 1988, she was awarded an Sc.D. degree by the University of Cambridge. In 1994, she gave the R.A.Fisher Lecture at the Joint Statistical Meetings in Toronto. In 1996, she gave the Neyman Lecture (IMS) at the Joint Statistical Meetings in Chicago. In 1998, she was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2001, she received the inaugural Jerome Sacks Award for Cross-Disciplinary Research from the National Institute for Statistical Science, and also the Weldon Prize for contributions to Biometry from the University of Oxford." For 2002-03 Elizabeth Thompson held a Guggenheim Fellowship, and in 2006 (Nov-Dec), she was a Rothschild Visiting Professor at the Isaac Newton Institute, University of Cambridge . In 2008, she was elected to the US National Academy of Sciences. In recent years she has given several named lectures. In 2003 she was the Allen T. Craig Distinguished Lecturer at the University of Iowa, and in 2004 the Buehler-Martin Distinguished Lecturer at the University of Minnesota. In 2005 she was both the Mary Cartwright Lecturer at the London Mathematical Society, UK, and the Milton Sobel Lecturer at U. California Santa Barbara, and in 2006 was the Distinguished Lecturer in Statistical Science at the Fields Institute in Toronto, the Bahadur Lecturer at the University of Chicago, and gave the XXVII Fisher Memorial Lecture at the Isaac Newton Institute, in Cambridge, UK, In 2008, she gave the inaugural Tukey Lecture at the 7th World Congress in Probability and Statistics in Singapore, and the 2008 Kristnaiah Lecture at Penn State University. In 2009, she gave the 2008 Cockerham Lecture at NCSU.