Dr Michael Francis Tompsett is a British-born physicist, engineer, and inventor and is the founding director of the US software company TheraManager. In the early 1960s, he studied physics at the University of Cambridge and completed an engineering PhD. He is a former researcher at the English Electric Valve Company, who later moved to Bell Labs in the United States. Tompsett invented CCD imagers and designed and built the first ever video camera with a solid-state (CCD) sensor. Tompsett received the Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering in 2017, along with Eric Fossum, George Smith, and Nobukazu Teranishi. Tompsett also received two other lifetime awards; the New Jersey Inventors Hall of Fame 2010 Pioneer Award and the 2012 IEEE Edison Medal. The thermal-imaging camera tube developed from his invention also earned a Queen's Award in 1987. He made technological contributions in several different specialty areas including materials science, night vision, charge-coupled devices and integrated circuit design over a lifetime of work. This includes the in-situ monitoring of deposited epitaxial films, un-cooled night-vision thermal imaging camera tubes, un-cooled solid-state thermal imagers, CCD imagers and CCD cameras, MOS mixed analogue-digital integrated systems, and integrated video analogue-digital converters.

The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) is an American 501(c)(3) professional association for electronics engineering, electrical engineering and related disciplines. The IEEE traces its founding to 1884 and the American Institute of Electrical Engineers. In 1912, the rival Institute of Radio Engineers was formed. Although the AIEE was initially larger, the IRE attracted more students and was larger by the mid-1950s. The AIEE and IRE merged in 1963. The IEEE has its headquarters in New York City but most of its business is done at the IEEE Operations Centre in Piscataway, New Jersey, opened in 1975. As of 2023, IEEE has over 460,000 members in 190 countries, with more than 66 percent from outside the United States. IEEE publishes approximately 200 peer-reviewed journals and magazines. It publishes more than 1,700 conference proceedings every year. The published content in these journals as well as the content from several hundred annual conferences sponsored by the IEEE are available in the IEEE Electronic Library (IEL). In addition to journals and conference proceedings, the IEEE also publishes tutorials and standards that are produced by its standardisation committees.