Tireless champion for Aboriginal Australians NEIL JOHN THOMSON Born   September 14, 1942 Died   January 24, 2016.
P rofessor Neil Thomson, who died earlier this year aged 73, worked tirelessly throughout his life to improve the health and wellbeing of Indigenous people in Australia. Among his many achievements, was the establishment of the groundbreaking Australian Indigenous HealthInfoNet - a multi- award winning, web- based resource dedicated to improving the health of Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders. 
Thomson was born in Dalwallinu, in the Western Australia wheatbelt, to parents John and Helen Thomson. He was the youngest of their four children. Near the end of the war years, his mother took the children to live in Perth, while his father stayed on their farm in   Maya. He attended Cannington State School and gained a scholarship to Perth Modern School.
After completing school, Thomson studied mathematics at the University of Western Australia, graduating with a science degree in 1965, and began work in the new field of computer science. He spent his early career with IBM in Canada.
Ultimately, his strong social conscience and desire to help people, led him to study medicine.
Thomson's thirst for knowledge saw him study medicine and arts (majoring in anthropology) concurrently at UWA, graduating in 1977 and 1978 respectively. In 1990 he attained a masters of public health from Sydney University and was admitted as a fellow of the Australian Faculty of Public Health Medicine (Royal College of Physicians). In 1998, he obtained a doctor of medicine from UWA. After graduating in medicine, Thomson and his family moved to the Kimberley, where he worked as a doctor at Derby and Wyndham hospitals, as well as running clinics with the Royal Flying Doctor Service. He witnessed first-hand the appalling inequalities in health between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people. This experience motivated him to work more specifically in public health and in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander health.
In the early 1980s, Thomson accepted a research fellowship at the Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies in Canberra.
This was a role that allowed him to blend his medical knowledge and expertise with his ability with statistics and data to develop insights into what was required to prevent disease and to promote health among Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders.
Thomson's success within this fellowship resulted in him joining the newly established Australian Institute of Health (now the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare) as head of its Aboriginal Health Unit, a position he held until 1993. Between 1989 and 1991, in recognition of his expertise in Indigenous health, Thomson served as the epidemiology consultant to the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody. As part of this work, he produced a national overview of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander health and jurisdictional summaries for NSW, Queensland, Western Australia, South Australia and the Northern Territory.
Keira James