William Thomas

Dr. William Thomas has directed AIP’s history, policy, and culture team since 2023. A historian of science, he earned his undergraduate degree in history from Northwestern University with a physics minor, and he received his PhD in the history of science from Harvard University in 2007. He spent three years as a postdoctoral historian at AIP and three years as a junior research fellow at Imperial College London. He has written on topics such as early particle physics, glaciological research in Antarctica, and the economic analysis of R&D. His primary scholarly focus has been the intertwined histories of scientific advice, the field of operations research, and the emergence of formal theories of decision-making—the subject of his 2015 book, Rational Action: The Sciences of Policy in Britain and America, 1940–1960 .

From 2016 to 2023, Dr. Thomas wrote for AIP’s FYI science policy news service, reporting extensively on subjects including space science, the national laboratory system, and the federal science budget process. In his current role he aims to support projects that bring the past and present into a more vibrant dialogue. He also aims to increase AIP’s ability to support the scholarly, scientific, and policymaking communities and to bring together their complementary perspectives on the physical sciences enterprise.