Thomas M. Lewis was born in Madison, Wisconsin, but spent his formative years in Milwaukee. He grew up on the city's northeast side in a neighborhood near the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Milwaukee had been a great industrial city, and some of its former swagger remained, but the city of Dr. Lewis' youth resembled a prizefighter past its prime and on the way down, a lovable old palooka with a big heart.

Dr. Lewis attended Saints Peter and Paul grade school and Messmer High School. He went to Marquette University in 1980. Marquette won the NCAA men's basketball tournament in 1977, but its days as a basketball powerhouse ended when Al McGuire retired that year. Dr. Lewis had many great teachers at Marquette, including Peter Jones, Tom Bronikowski, Michael Gillespie, and Harry Klocker, S.J. He left Marquette with a Bachelor of Science in Mathematics. From there, he went 90 miles west to the University of Wisconsin-Madison for graduate school in mathematics. He intended to study algebra, but found himself drawn to analysis and probability. He had many wonderful teachers and mentors at the University of Wisconsin, including Jim Kuelbs, Tom Kurtz, and Peter Ney. His dissertation, A Law of the Iterated Logarithm for Random Walk in Random Scenery, was written under the direction of Kuelbs.

Dr. Lewis left the University of Wisconsin in 1991 for Greenville, South Carolina and Furman University. Over the years, he has had the pleasure of working in the company of many dedicated colleagues and students. While he continues to work primarily in probability theory, his research interests have broadened over the years, largely due to working with students on research projects. His research interests are: random walk in random scenery; iterated Brownian motion; the Gaussian correlation inequality; fractal geometry; random graphs; and combinatorics. Dr. Lewis has had the opportunity to work with and learn from some of best mathematicians of his generation: Wenbo Li, Davar Khonevisan, Joel Zinn, Geoffrey Pritchard, and Zhan Shi.

Education
Ph.D.
University of Wisconsin - Madison
B.S.
Marquette University