Lonnie Thompson is an American paleoclimatologist and Distinguished University Professor in the School of Earth Sciences at The Ohio State University. He has achieved global recognition for his drilling and analysis of ice cores from mountain glaciers and ice caps in the tropical and sub-tropical regions of the world. He and his wife, Ellen Mosley-Thompson, run the ice core paleoclimatology research group at the Byrd Polar Research Center. He was born on July 1, 1948 in Huntington, West Virginia, United States. Lonnie Thompson was born July 1, 1948 in Gassaway, West Virginia. Thompson has received dozens of awards for his work, including the National Medal of Science and the Seligman Crystal, the International Glaciological Society’s highest honor. In 2005, he was elected as a member of the National Academy of Sciences and a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and in 2009, he was selected as a Foreign Member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.