Dooie Thomas was my classmate. He was also a good friend. We first met at IIT in the Class of 1974 (EE) and we studied together for 5 years. Because of our last names beginning with “T” (Thakor and Thomas) meant that we shared many labs and workshop times together. As years went by, another opportunity to study and hang around together arose. I ended up at University of Wisconsin (Madison), where Dooie was doing his PhD as well. He became my host and a friend once again. He was a bright star that lived on this earth for all too short.
If I’m not mistaken, Dooie was Bombay University topper and of course ranked among the very top students in JEE. And, not surprisingly, he continued to do very well academically at IIT. But we had many smart and brilliant students. What set Dooie aside was his and gentleman personality -and kindness with which he was available to help and collaborate. He was one person I felt very comfortable going to for some math problems. But we both shared the love for drawing and fine metal/wood workshop that many students didn’t like at all. It was a different kind of friendship arising from a shared hobby-like interest.
We both went to University of Wisconsin to do our Ph.D. on a scholarship, although I arrived there two years after Dooie since I worked in India before starting graduate school. I arrived in the middle of winter, and we reserved a furnished apartment right across from his. All through bitter winters of Wisconsin, we cooked food together, studied together and survived the brutal winter. Very anecdotally and humorously, we had no clue about what a good diet and diet’s effect on health was. So, we used to happily cook eggs and sausages every day. And we gobbled up half a gallon of ice cream quite often. Both of us were initially scrawny and put on weight in one semester and then we stopped, changed our diet!
Dooie was working with a very high-minded stern German professor doing very fundamental transistor physics. This work very linearly extrapolated from some of the semiconductor and transistor physics and circuits that we learned at IIT. Unfortunately, either the demands of his thesis problem or, more likely, the expectations of his advisor, it took Dooie quite some time to finish his PhD and he graduated later (after I left Madison for Chicago and Northwestern University). Fortunately, he found an excellent position with the famous company, Hewlett Packard. He put his transistor physics and modeling work towards integrated circuit design. He was finally ready to lead a good life in California. Indeed, so much so that he was engaged to marry, and that event was also forthcoming. And then, alas, came the shocking news that he collapsed, he was rushed to the hospital, and while he was waiting for the scheduled surgery and before his medical problem would be taken care of his heart failed. I believe he had some congenital heart vascular or valve problem that was undiagnosed. Then, very vaguely, I recalled that when we exercised together, he would occasionally have blood coming out of his mouth into his handkerchief. So, he was harboring some undiagnosed condition that finally took his life.
Tragedy is that had Dooie had been a great student, found a good career and would have had a wonderful family life ahead of him (as he was about to get married). Tragically, that was not to be. Several of his friends pooled resources together to host his parents and took them around Madison, Wisconsin, and elsewhere where he lived to have them to touch a bit of his life in the US that they were not part of.
Dooie was a brilliant student, a gentleman, and a kind and wonderful friend. He was shooting star that had glorious past and a beautiful life ahead of him. But now all we are left with is a warm glow of somebody I’m proud to have known and have spent time with. I wish I could find a way to relay this message to his family and pay my respect. At least, I hope we, his classmates should take time to recognize a friend we lost. As Vijay. Vashee, his classmate and friend very simply put, “I (we) miss him.”
Dooie Thomas (Curriculum Vitae)
B. Tech. Project “A programmable pulse generator”, 1974
Ph.D. Thesis “The forward biased, Abrupt p–n junction.”
Publications
Henry Guckel a, Adnan Demirkol a, Dooie Thomas b, Seshadri Iyengar The calculation of the current gain of bipolar transistors and the theory for the forward-biased p-n junction at all injection levels,” Solid-State Electronics, Vo. 25(2), pp. 105-113, 1982.
H. Guckel, D. C. Thomas and A. Demirkol, “An alternative to angle lap and stain analysis of Gaussian diffusions,” in IEEE Transactions on Electron Devices, vol. 26, no. 5, pp. 776-779, May 1979, doi: 10.1109/T-ED.1979.19492.
Affiliations
Indian Institute of Technology, Electrical Engineering, 1969-1974
Integrated Circuits Laboratory, Department of Electrical Engineering, University of Wisconsin, Madison, WI 53706, U.S.A.
Hewlett-Packard Laboratories, 3172 Porter Drive, Palo Alto, CA 94304, U.S.A.
Noteworthy – In honor and memory of Dooie Thomas, his classmate Vijay Vashee gave $50,000 in September 2002 for Excellence in Research Awards and $59973 on September 17, 2002 for Thomas Dooie Fellowship for a Dual Degree student in the CSE department.
IIT Bombay 1974 Reunion 