Robert L. Thompson has made distinguished contributions as a professor, in the public service, and as an academic administrator. Throughout his career, Thompson has maintained that to be credible, an international researcher must learn foreign languages and have long-term residence overseas--a standard he imposed himself, spending five years overseas between 1965 and 1974. He has lectured, consulted, or carried out research on over 60 countries in all parts of the world.

Upon joining the faculty at Purdue University in 1974, Thompson quickly built a nationally recognized research and teaching program in international agricultural trade. He and his students made important contributions to understanding the structure and functioning of the world grain and oilseed markets. This work was guided by a philosophy that if we are to understand world commodity markets, we must understand the national markets that are linked through trade. His trade modeling work also demonstrated that the prevalence of non-tariff barriers to agricultural trade increased the variance of world market prices and that greater price variability may induce other countries to cut the link between internal and world market prices.

The second important area of Thompson's research has been policy analysis. His work focused on the important relationships between U.S. domestic policy and international markets. He demonstrated clearly that traditional closed economy partial equilibrium analysis of U.S. agricultural policy was not only flawed, but could be misleading. He was also among the earliest path breakers in attempting to empirically quantify the macroeconomics linkages between agriculture and the rest of the U.S. economy.

The second phase in Robert Thompson's career was one of public service to the federal government. He served his first as Senior Staff Economist for Food and Agriculture on the President's Council of Economic Advisers during 1983-85, a particularly difficult time for American agriculture. In this capacity his analytical expertise was quickly recognized, and he became a key player in interagency deliberation on issues ranging from farm financial crisis to declining exports to preparations for the 1985 Farm Bill. His chapter on "Food and Agriculture" in the 1984 Economic Report of the President stands as a landmark that helped shape that policy debate.

Building upon his work at CEA, Thompson then became Assistant Secretary for Economics at USDA. Thompson served as the administration spokesman to the Senate Agriculture Committee for the 1985 Farm Bill. He skillfully worked with the committees to re-establish the export competitiveness of agriculture while assisting financially stressed farmers without breaking the budget. The considerable satisfaction of many observers with the Food Security Act of the 1985 is a testament to his accomplishments.

Thompson also played a key role in laying the groundwork for the Uruguay Round of multilateral trade negotiations. In particular, he was instrumental in ensuring that each country's internal agricultural policies which affect trade were well documented and qualified. He also catalyzed research on the likely effects of reducing these subsides. This work irrevocably modified the substance of the agricultural deliberations in the Uruguay Round reactive to all previous GATT rounds.

The third and most recent phase of Thompson's career began in 1987, when he returned to Purdue University as Dean of Agriculture. Under his leadership, Purdue has reversed the enrollment slide that has plagued most schools of agriculture. He has aggressively sought and gained state appropriations ($4 million of recurring funding to date) and outside support to stabilize in the face of shrinking real federal support for agricultural research and extension. In 1991, he was elected as a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and President-elect of the International Association of Agricultural Economists. In the past year he has elected as a Foreign Member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Agriculture and Forestry and of the Ukrainian Academy of Agricultural Sciences.