Charles Thompson is Professor of Electrical and “Computer Engineering, Director of the Center for Advanced Computation and Telecommunications and formerly Associate to the Dean for Research and Graduate Study at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell. He received a B.S. in E.E. from New York University, a M.S. at the Polytechnic University, and a Ph.D. in Acoustics at MIT in 1982.

Upon graduation he became an Assistant Professor of Engineering Science and Mechanics at the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. In 1987 he joined the Department Electrical and Computer Engineering at UMASS Lowell as its Analog Devices Career Development Professor. Dr. Thompson has served on the executive boards of the Cooperative Research Fellowship program of Bell Laboratories (1991-1999) and the AT&T Labs Fellowship Program (1996-2006).

At Bell Laboratories, Dr. Thompson created with the Vice President of Research and Nobel Laureate, Arno Penizas, the W. Lincoln Hawkins Mentoring Excellence Award (1994). This award is given to a member of the research staff for fostering the career growth of Bell Labs students and associates. This award is Research’s highest honor for mentoring contributions. In 1998, AT&T Labs instituted a similar award named for Dr. Thompson.

His awards include the US Presidential Award for Excellence in Mentoring; Tau Beta Pi Eminent Engineer; James E. Blackwell Scholar; AT&T Bell Laboratories Cooperative Research Fellowship. He is cited in Who’s Who among African Americans, Education, and Technology Today; American Mean and Women of Science; he is a Fellow of the Acoustical Society of America and cited for his fundamental contributions to theoretical and computational acoustics. He is senior member of IEEE, and a member of the American Physical Society and Sigma Xi. He has published on acoustics, control theory, fluid mechanics, heat transfer, linear an nonlinear systems, and telecommunications.