Laird A. Thompson (born 6 September 1947), is a professor emeritus of astronomy at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
in both physics and astronomy from the University of California, Los Angeles in 1969.
He is professionally associated with the International Astronomical Union, the American Astronomical Society, the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, the International Society for Optical Engineering, and has served as an adjunct member of the Center for Adaptive Optics.
[2] In the early 1980s, he began to work on projects aimed at improving the image quality at ground-based telescopes.
His first instrument was a microprocessor controlled tip-tilt system called ISIS which was built at the Institute for Astronomy for use at the Mauna Kea Observatory in Hawaii.