After Professor Thoma received his B.S. degree in chemical engineering (1980), he spent two years in Malaysia as a Peace Corps volunteer teaching high school biology and chemistry. Following an M.S. degree in chemical engineering at the University of Arkansas (1986), he spent two years with a small consulting fi rm before moving to LSU for doctoral studies. He has been on the faculty at the University of Arkansas since 1994. In 2003, he was appointed to the endowed Bates Teaching Professorship in Chemical Engineering. Dr. Thoma has spent the past 20 years focusing on the application of chemical engineering principles to solutions of difficult environmental problems, and includes work at the laboratory, greenhouse, and fi eld scale, as well as mathematical modeling, both deterministic and probabilistic in nature. These projects are multi-disciplinary and multi-university in scope, involving Geosciences, Biological Sciences, Crop Soil, and Environmental Sciences on the UA campus and Botany and Microbiology from Oklahoma University and Chemical Engineering from Tulsa University, as well as Argonne National Laboratory.

Arkansas Academy of Chemical Engineers, 2008.