Thomas L. Atwood PhD

Following service in the 299th Combat Engineering Battalion in Vietnam, Thomas Atwood returned to his studies and was awarded a PhD in high-energy physics from the University of Maryland for his participation in an experiment at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center. His thesis involved measuring what happens when electrons are collided with their positron anti-particles at the highest energies then available. As computer technology advanced and computers became more widely available, Thomas moved into the private sector as a software engineer. He wrote software to improve down-hole oil exploration and production and oil refining. He has experimented with speech recognition and machine intelligence software. More recently he wrote the program used by the CDC to interpret chest X-rays. Thomas served as a youth soccer coach and director of coaching. He has been a volunteer firefighter, and served 17 years as a volunteer fire and EMS commissioner in Travis County, Texas. He has always read extensively in history and science. With his broad knowledge, his background as a curious and discriminating scientist and his wide-ranging life experiences, Thomas was ready when Mother Nature threw him a curve ball in the form of a seriously mentally handicapped Labrador retriever named “Beauty”.