There’s nothing like 700-level computer science classes to bring on the father-son bonding: just ask Jay and Nathan Thom.
Jay will be receiving a doctorate in Computer Science & Engineering at the May 17 Engineering graduation ceremony, and so will his son, Nathan.
“Graduating with a Ph.D. is a really satisfying accomplishment for me, but graduating with one of my sons will make it one of the most memorable experiences of my life,” said Jay, who also works in the College of Engineering’s Computer Science & Engineering Department as a senior information security engineer.
The two studied together, supported each other and maybe once or twice Jay kept Nathan on track.
“He was a good influence,” Nathan, who goes by Nate, said. “He was the friend you needed to have.”
When Nate joined the University of Nevada, Reno in 2015, Jay helped him with calculus. Years later, Nate would return the favor when Jay needed help with the math in a game theory class. The two have shared lab space and even co-authored two conference papers about Internet of Things (IoT) device identification.
Additional co-authors on those papers were Professor Shamik Sengupta and Assistant Professor Emily Hand, each of whom served as Ph.D. advisors for Jay and Nate, respectively.
“Jay and Nate have been extremely helpful, cooperative and hardworking people,” Sengupta said. “They are extremely friendly and always ready to help on a moment’s notice.”
Sengupta added that Jay will be his 10th Ph.D. student to graduate; for Hand, the experience of mentoring a Ph.D. student through graduation is new.
“Nate has been wonderful to work with,” she said. “He and Jay both have been an asset to the (CSE) department and college. They serve as our resident IT guys, helping with anything and everything in our labs.”
Anomaly in the data set
Parent-child graduations are somewhat unusual, but not for Jay. In 2015, he received his Bachelor of Science degree alongside his son Ben.
Also out of the ordinary: Jay was a teaching assistant for a class in which his two other sons, Max and Nick, were students.
Nate, the youngest, remembers hanging out with his brothers on the University campus even before he enrolled as a student. When he was 13, Nate was homeschooled by Jay, and would tag along with his father to the University and study on campus. His three older brothers also were students at that time, and as Nate remembers, “Mom had just graduated.”
“Mom” is Shendry Thom, who earned bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral degrees in nursing from the University.
And of course, the University is where Shendry met Jay, back in the 1980s.
The campus has been somewhat of a stomping ground for the Thom family.
“It feels like home,” Nate said.
Family affair
If campus feels like home, computer science is where everyone seems to gather: Nate’s older brothers Ben, Max and Nick are software engineers in the Reno area; Nate’s wife Kathleen currently studies computer science at the University; and Nick’s fiancé, Maddy, is pursuing a master’s degree in computer science, also at the University. Jay might be responsible for this family trend, according to Nate.
Jay originally studied electrical engineering in the 1980s, but when he returned to the University to study computer science, Nate said, “that was the same year Max had started college. That influenced him and me. We’re all in computer science.”
Their areas of expertise vary, however. Jay’s dissertation, “AI Enabled IOT Network Traffic Fingerprinting with Locality Sensitive Hashing,” deals with training smart devices to communicate with each other securely. Nate’s dissertation, “Attributes in Face Processing: Novel Methods for Explanation, Training and Representation,” is about improving AI systems that recognize faces.
What they have in common — besides genetics — is a strong interest in advancing the field of computer science.
“We’re really good at coming up with big ideas,” Nate said. “One of the things we say is ‘create value.’ Every time we show up somewhere, we try to create value.”
