Peter James Thomas

Peter James Thomas is a British academic and entrepreneur.

Thomas was educated at Mexborough Grammar School, South Yorkshire, York St. John University, the University of Cambridge and the University of Hull. Following a PhD at The University of Hull in the applications of social science to computing, he lectured in Human-Computer Interaction at Brunel University, West London between 1990–1992 and became Professor of Information Management and Director of the Centre for Personal Information Management at the University of the West of England, Bristol in 1993. During 1999-2000 he was Executive Director of the Interactive Information Institute (III) at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia, and in 2000-2001 was CTO of Serco's e-Business consulting group, and adviser to Serco Usability (now Serco ExperienceLab). Thomas was founder of the EPSRC-funded Appliance Design Network and chaired the three international Appliance Design (AD) conferences held at HP Labs, Bristol in 2002, 2003 and 2004. In 2004 he founded the user experience research company CareyThomas in Melbourne, Australia and in 2007 he founded the Manifesto Group which operates in Australia, the UK and the US. Between 2009-13 he was a Senior Fellow at The University of Melbourne, Australia where he taught entrepreneurship in the Department of Information systems, a visiting Professor at Brunel University, West London in the Department of Information Systems and Brunel Business School, visiting Professor of Financial Innovation at Falmouth University, and visiting Professor of practice at Newcastle University. Thomas is founder and editor-in-chief of the Springer research journal Personal and Ubiquitous Computing. He is co-founder, Governor and Chief Operating Officer of The Leasing Foundation, a London-based non-profit organisation that supports the leasing and asset finance industry, and creative director of Medicine Unboxed, a social enterprise that integrates the humanities and medicine.