Faculty Profile: Dr. Andrew Thall
Dr. Andrew Thall is a man of many talents—as an undergraduate at Kalamazoo College, he majored in mathematics but was only interested in pure mathematics theory. After college, he worked as a baker, and then in a photo lab, before going back to school part-time.
“When I began my graduate work at Carolina, I happened to wander into the computer science building,” the associate professor of mathematics and computer science says. “This was when they were designing their own graphics supercomputers and just starting to work with virtual reality. It was then I decided to study computers.”
Thall researches computer graphics and numeric and scientific computing, specifically image analysis. He worked for a time analyzing computer images for the department of radiation-oncology, and earned his doctorate at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2004.
He taught at Allegheny College in Pennsylvania and the University of Minnesota, Morris before coming to Alma.
“As a Michigan native, I knew of Alma College and I was looking to teach at a smaller school,” he says. “The best part of my job is being able to work with the students in the computer lab in a hands-on setting.”
In his spare time, he enjoys cooking, especially Chinese, playing guitar and spending time with his wife and son.
