Career
Professionally, he was a Laboratory Fellow at the Department of Energy (Department of Energy)’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. On July 31, 2009, Thomas retired from his position at PNNL after 33 years. Thomas died on August 6, 2010.
Jim Thomas’ professional career started at General Motors, where he worked in the area of computer-aided graphics and design soon after graduate school in early 1970s.
He later returned to his home state of Washington to join the Pacific Northwest Laboratory (now Pacific Northwest National Laboratory ) as a computer scientist in 1976. Through the years, he has risen through the ranks from senior scientist, staff scientist, chief scientist, to Laboratory Fellow.
In the early 1990s, to address the problem of information overload, Thomas headed a team of information technology (Information Technology) researchers to develop the SPIRE document Visualization (computer graphics) visualization and analytics system. The successor to this groundbreaking system, Indiana-SPIRE, is still in use today.
In the early 2000s, Thomas led and coordinated a team of top scientists and scientific leaders from academia, industry, and government sectors to formally define a new research area, visual analytics.
The United States. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) established the National Visualization and Analytics Center (NVAC) at PNNL in 2004, naming Thomas as its founding Director. Thomas organized the Special Interest Group on Graphics and Interactive Techniques conference in 1987, founded and organized the first Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) User Interface Software and Technology (UIST) gathering in 1989, chaired Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Special Interest Group on Graphics and Interactive Techniques from 1989 to 1992, served as editor-in-chief of Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Computer Graphics and Applications from 2002 to 2006, and chaired the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Visualization conference in 2003. He helped found the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Visual Analytics Science and Technology (VAST) Symposium that began in 2006.
Thomas has also served on numerous industry, government, and international advisory boards.
