Rate My Professor Pamela Thompson

In her career at Catawba College, Dr. Thompson has held key appointments, including Interim Chair of the Ketner School of Business. She advises the Tech Club and serves as faculty advisor for FBLA-Collegiate, where her students have earned national recognition at conferences such as the FBLA-C National Leadership Conference. As an adjunct lecturer in the School of Data Science and College of Computing and Informatics at UNC Charlotte, she contributes to graduate faculty and teaches courses like Big Data Design, Storage, and Provenance in Healthcare. Dr. Thompson's research specializes in data science applications, including mining proprietary big data from acoustic telemetry to predict great white shark presence in nearshore waters off Cape Cod. This interdisciplinary work integrates weather data and machine learning for predictive modeling. Her Ph.D. dissertation focused on mining knowledge to build a decision support system for tinnitus diagnosis and treatment. She presented 'Developing a Recommender System for Shark Presence along East Coast Beaches' at the SAS Deep Learning Symposium, selected from 55 applicants, and co-presented 'Bridging Trust and Technology: Explainable AI in Action' at the 2025 Charlotte Women in Data Science Conference, utilizing techniques such as SHAP, PDP, ALE, LIME, and rule-based interpretations on shark movement data.