Tompa received his doctorate from the University of Toronto in 1974 and has been a faculty member with the school since. He served as chair of Computer Science for two terms, one in the 1990s and one in the 2000s.
In 2012, Tompa was awarded the Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Medal which was created "to honour Her Majesty for her service to this country... [and] to honour significant contributions and achievements by Canadians"; more specifically "in light of ... significant contributions to text data and design systems for maintaining large reference texts."*
In 2010 he was named a Fellow by the Association for Computing Machinery for his contributions to "text-dominated and semi-structured data management." In 2005, a street in the University of Waterloo's Research and Technology Park was named Frank Tompa Drive to recognize his contributions to both the City of Waterloo and the University of Waterloo.
Free parking is available at the University Club.
Hope to see you there.