TRAN THONG, Ph.D.

Dr. TRAN THONG is the Vice-President of Systems Design and Development, Micro Systems Engineering, Inc. (MSEI), a Biotronik company in Lake Oswego, Oregon, USA. Biotronik GmbH, Berlin, Germany, is a leading manufacturer of cardiac pacemakers and other cardiovascular instruments. Prior to joining MSEI in 1993, he held a number of technical and management positions at Tektronix Federal Systems, Inc., Beaverton, Oregon. These included Vice-President of Research and Engineering and General Manager of the Digital Signal Processing Business unit; Director of the Electronics Laboratory, Tektronix Laboratories. He also worked at General Electric Company, Litton Industries, AT&T Bell Laboratories. Dr. Thong received his BSEE degree, with distinction, from the Illinois Institute of Technology, Illinois, his MSE, MA and PhD degrees, all in Electrical Engineering, from Princeton University. Dr. Thong holds 11 U.S. patents and has published over 40 technical papers. He is a Fellow of the IEEE. He was the General Chair of the 1989 IEEE Symposium on Circuits and Systems, the Executive Vice-President of the IEEE Circuits and Systems Society (1989-1990), associate editor of the IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems. He was a founding member of VACETS, its first Chairman (1994-95) and the past-President (1995-96) of VACETS. He served as a member of VACETS Board of Director from 1994 to 1996. Currently, he is an advisor to VACETS. He has held faculty appointments at a number of universities. He is currently on the Board of Advisors of the Zentralinstitut fuer biomedizinische Technik, University of Erlangen, Erlangen, Germany.