Thomson receives Distinguished Young Alumni Award
CHADRON – Dr. T.J. Thomson, an associate professor in visual communication and media and a chief investigator at the Queensland University of Technology Digital Media Research Centre in Australia, is a recipient (in absentia) of Chadron State College’s Distinguished Young Alumni (DYA) award. He was in the U.S. to see his family this summer and received the award in a small ceremony.
The DYA is presented to CSC alumni who distinguished themselves in their chosen career or community or shown exceptional service to the college and are 40 years of age or younger.
Other DYA honorees include Dr. Nisha Durand and Ryan Hieb. Distinguished Alumni Award (DAA) recipients will be Dora Olivares and Mark Brohman. Family Tree Awards will be conferred upon the Guzman and Brown families.
Thomson leads the News, Media, and Journalism Research Group at the QUT Digital Media Research Centre. He is the author of To See and Be Seen: The Environments, Interactions, and Identities Behind News Images, winner of the National Communication Association’s 2020 Diane S. Hope Book of the Year Award.
He is the 2019 Anne Dunn Scholar of the Year, jointly bestowed by the Journalism Education and Research Association of Australia, and the Australia and New Zealand Communication Association. His other research and teaching awards include the 2022 Linda Shockley Award for Excellence in Teaching, the 2022 James Edwards Article of the Year Award, and the 2021 Visual Communication Teaching Excellence Award.
Thomson is a chief investigator on the Australian Research Council-funded Amplifying Voices from the Royal Commission into Aged Care Discovery Project and has also received research funding from the Australian Academy of the Humanities and the International Visual Literacy Association.
Thomson is actively involved nationally and internationally in associations and initiatives that contribute to the interdisciplinary visual communication field. He serves on the editorial board of the journal Visual Communication Quarterly and has been one of its associate editors from 2017 to present.
He is a life member in the International Communication Association, the International Visual Literacy Association, and a member of the Visual Communication divisions in the Association for Education in Journalism, the Mass Communications Association, and the National Communication Association.
In 2022, Thomson’s peers elected him to the Queensland Academy of Arts and Sciences in recognition of his significant contributions to the academy, the professions or society.
Thomson established the Trudy M. Thomson Legacy Endowment in honor of his mother, Trudy M. Thomson, who grew up in Golden, Colorado. She taught English as an additional language to international students at the Colorado School of Mines and has nearly four decades of experience teaching and directing this program. In 2022, she published “Table Talks: A conversational approach to learning English as an additional language.”
Category: Campus News, Chadron State Alumni & Foundation