Ranjan welcomes Jim Thompson for inaugural Distinguished Lecture

Devesh Ranjan, the Grainger Dean of the College of Engineering, knows Badger engineering alumni have stories to tell about the meaningful impacts they’ve made around the world. As dean—and an alumnus himself—Ranjan regularly meets with alumni, and he’s been able to learn about and see the results of their work firsthand.

Ranjan wanted to share those alumni experiences with the college’s students. So, on Oct. 15, 2025, he launched the Dean’s Distinguished Lecture Series, kicking it off by welcoming Jim Thompson (BSEE ‘85, MSEE ‘87, PhDEE ‘91). In the series, Ranjan will hold fireside-chat-style conversations with alumni about their experiences and how their UW-Madison engineering educations prepared them for success.

“Our alumni have so many great stories,” Ranjan says, “and my hope for this series is to bring those stories here to share with the college.”

Thompson, the retired chief technology officer of multinational mobile chip, semiconductor and software giant Qualcomm Technologies, spoke with Ranjan and took questions from attendees in a packed Cheney Room in Engineering Hall. He told a story of perseverance that started all the way back in his first year at UW-Madison, when he—a standout student in high school, unaccustomed to academic struggles—flopped on an early test. While his confidence was shaken, he realized his basic calculator wasn’t cut out for the work he needed to do. Once he upgraded to a scientific calculator—“To an HP-15C: I still remember because it changed my life,” he said to laughter—his academic performance improved.

Later in his career, Thompson was leading a team working on a low-earth orbit communication satellite. He said it was the most complex project Qualcomm had ever worked on at the time, and the team was struggling with only a few months to go before commercialization. Thompson decided to shuffle team responsibilities and direct the team to work long hours through the weekend, which got the project back on track.

“It was a big lesson early on—that a lot of this stuff is hard and it’s easy to say ‘I don’t know if I can make it,’” Thompson says. “But perseverance is a very important quality for engineering, because almost everything is harder than you think. You think you just have to calculate the formula and you’ll know exactly what to do. Nothing is that clear. So you have to persevere through it.”

Photos: Sirtaj S. Grewal, UW-Madison SMPH Media Solutions