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 connection with her genetic research, Dr. Thompson has several longterm research collaborations at other Universities, including University of Utah (1976, 1978, 1986, 1988), University of Michigan (1975, 1977, 1988, 1994), Rutgers University (1992, 1995) and McGill University (1995). Her main editorial service has been as Associate Editor of Genetics (1987-92), Biometrics (Shorter Communications) (1993-1996), and Annals of Statistics (since 1994). From 1994-1997 she was a member of the NRC Committee on Applied and Theoretical Statistics ( CATS), and from 1998-2000 a member of the Council of the International Statistical Institute (ISI). She served as President of WNAR (West North American Region of the International Biometric Society) in 1998. She is a member of the NISS Board of Trustees (2001-2003), and of the PIMS Scientific Advisory Board (2002-??).
Since 1987, Dr. Thompson has held NSF grants in Population Biology (1987-90), Conservation Biology (1990-93) and Computational Biology (1993-97 and 1998-2002). Since 1991, she has held an NIH grant in the Genetic Epidemiology of Complex Traits. She has also been a member of the Program in Mathematics and Molecular Biology (PMMB) since 1994; this is an inter-University consortium which funds fellowships, studentships, and funding in member labs. Originally funded by NSF, since 1/1/1997 PMMB has been a Burroughs Wellcome Interfaces of Science program, with the mission to recruit and train students from the mathematical sciences in cross-disciplinary work in mathematical molecular biology. Since 1999, Dr. Thompson's focus has been the development of research and education in Statistical Genetics at the University of Washington. In September 2000, her IMS monograph on modern methods of Pedigree Analysis was published.
At UW, Dr. Thompson was an active participant in the QERM interdisciplinary group from 1990-2002, and since 1995 in the Mathematical Biology Fellows program organized through the Zoology department. Since 1989, jointly with Dr. Ellen Wijsman, she has been coordinating the Statistical Genetics discussion seminar . She is also one of the faculty of the NIH-funded Genome Training Grant, which since Fall 2000 has provided support for some Statistical Genetics students.
In 1981, she 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 from the University of Oxford. For 2002-3 she held a Guggenheim Fellowship.
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.