BENGALURU : Joy Aloysius Thomas, an Indian-American Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) expert, and a Josephite was recently honoured with the 2021 St. Joseph’s Boys’ High School Old Boys’ Association’s Lifetime Achievement Award. He studied in the school between 1971 and 1979. With this, Thomas joins a stellar group of awardees that includes nine Olympians, four national team captains, including Rahul Dravid, and tech leaders such as Sabeer Bhatia, founder of Hotmail. The award honours distinguished alumni who have gone onto make a significant impact, professionally and personally.
“Joy was perhaps the most brilliant gift from India to the US in engineering sciences in recent decades,” said Arogyaswami Paulraj, Professor Emeritus, Stanford University. Thomas earned several accolades over the years, right from when he topped the school in the ICSE exams in 1977. He then went on and topped the Joint Entrance Exam (JEE) of the Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT) as a 16-year-old in 1979, after which he won the IEEE’s Charles LeGeyt Fortescue scholarship and the IBM Fellowship in Rs 84 and Rs 85, respectively, to fund his PhD at the Stanford University.
Along the way as a budding graduate student, he spent an extra year at Stanford solely to co-author the seminal book in Information Theory- ‘Elements of Information Theory’ with his doctoral thesis advisor, Prof Tom Cover. The book is in active use by students world-wide and has achieved broad appeal in disciplines from Physics to Biology, and Genomics to Game Theory.
Thomas’ legacy lives on in the Joy Thomas Foundation (JTF). Created by his friends and colleagues, JTF focuses on inspiring STEM excellence, including at St. Joseph’s, where Thomas’ science journey started. JTF brings together over 1,000 fellow STEM alumni and tech leaders from the IITs, Stanford, Google, and hundreds of other tech companies and institutions.