James Thomson

Thomson graduated with a B.S. in biophysics from the University of Illinois in 1981. He entered the Veterinary Medical Scientist Training Program at the University of Pennsylvania, receiving his doctorate in veterinary medicine in 1985, and his doctorate in molecular biology in 1988. His doctoral thesis involved understanding genetic imprinting in early mammalian development under the mentorship of Davor Solter at the Wistar Institute. Thomson also spent two years (1989–91) as a postdoctoral research fellow in the Primate In Vitro Fertilization and Experimental Embryology Laboratory at the Oregon National Primate Research Center, and completed a residency in veterinary pathology at the University of Wisconsin–Madison (1991–1994). He joined the Wisconsin Regional (now National) Primate Research Center on campus as its chief pathologist in 1995. There, he became the first in the world to successfully isolate and culture nonhuman primate embryonic stem cells. This led to his human embryonic stem cell discovery in 1998.

He serves as Director of Regenerative Biology at the Morgridge Institute for Research in Madison, Wisconsin, is a professor in the Department of Cell and Regenerative Biology at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health and a professor in the Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology Department at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is also a founder of Cellular Dynamics International, a Madison-based company producing derivatives of human induced pluripotent stem cells for drug discovery and toxicity testing.