Dr Richard Thomas is UK & Ireland's first LabVIEW Champion

Mike Bailey, LabVIEW Marketing Manager for National Instruments UK & Ireland, says: "The prestigious LabVIEW Champion title exists as a way to validate and thank outstanding advocates for their participation and willingness to help others in our user community, as well as provide them with the technical resources to help others in the future. Richard Thomas cares deeply about how LabVIEW is portrayed and taught, and his work with user groups is inspirational."

The National Instruments online community is a resource for its 170,000 members to discover and collaborate on example code, tutorials, textbooks and more. Engineers and scientists around the globe share development techniques, learn about cutting-edge technologies and connect with LabVIEW and other NI product experts working on similar applications.

Dr Thomas has a highly positive impact in technical and product communities, both locally and online. He hosts the Cambridge LabVIEW Users Group and frequently authors and presents material on a wide range of topics, including object-oriented programming and user interface design. In addition, he recently won a National Instruments world-wide LabVIEW Coding Challenge, a competition to transform a basic LabVIEW Front Panel into a fully functioning User Interface that is both creative and easy to use. Dr Thomas' winning entry was chosen based on the number of 'likes' it received from the LabVIEW community members.

Dr Thomas says: "I am a hugely enthusiastic LabVIEW programmer and enjoy pushing LabVIEW and NI hardware to their limits. By staying active with the LabVIEW community of developers, I not only keep my own skill up to date, but raise the quality of LabVIEW-based measurement and control systems around the world."

Now qualified as a Certified LabVIEW Architect, Dr Thomas began programming in LabVIEW 12 years ago as a post-graduate student at Leicester University, acquiring and analysing data from a large-scale laminar wind tunnel. He continued to use the award-winning system design software in his career at the Turbomachinery Group of the Engineering Department at Cambridge University, where LabVIEW is used extensively for hardware control and instrumentation acquisition and data analysis. Dr Thomas now works as a Senior Systems Engineer at Product Technology Partners, a Cambridge-based software consultancy providing solutions to scientific and industrial software challenges. To learn more about the LabVIEW Champions Program go to www.bit.ly/lvchampion