For more than 14 years, Dr. Thompson served as a Research Advisor for Shelby County Schools (SCS) designing research projects, evaluating state and federal programs and initiatives, and producing publication-quality reports. Most notably, Dr. Thompson conducted a research study, Investigating Inequities in Disciplinary Practices in SCS, to explore school-level factors contributing to ethnic- and gender-based discipline disparities within the district.

Currently, Dr. Thompson serves as the Senior Education Researcher at CSEdResearch.org where she works to ensure equity and access in the field of Computer Science, with a focus on advancing the academic and economic outcomes of underrepresented youth. Dr. Thompson specializes in outcome and impact evaluations, employing evaluation surveys, and building organizational capacity for understanding and utilizing evaluations.

Dr. Thompson earned her Ph.D. in Educational Psychology from the University of Memphis in 2010. She presented her Dissertation entitled The relationships among race, gender, school poverty concentration, mathematics achievement, and educational values of students and peers at the American Educational Research Association Conference in San Francisco on Education and Poverty: Theory, Research, Policy, and Praxis.