Nartker, Thomas A.

Thomas Nartker was born and raised in Dayton, Ohio. He attended grade school and high school there, and then attended the University of Dayton. He majored in chemical engineering. By the time Nartker was a sophomore in college, He had already been accepted for graduate study at the University of Tennessee.

Nartker applied and was accepted at Texas Agricultural and Mechanical (A&M). He worked with Dave Billingsley, who was the resident computer expert, and Billingsley showed him how to process all the data he had collected for his master's thesis on the IBM 650. Nartker had found a new passion.

Within a year, Nartker was working as an assistant in the data processing center at Texas A&M, and was also the teaching assistant for the computer programming class. After completing his PhD, he accepted a position at New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology (NMIMT) as assistant professor of mathematics and director of the computing center. Nartker left NMIMT in 1981 and took a job with Shell Oil Company, which included 5 years as a visiting staff member at Los Alamos, New Mexico.

In 1985 he met John Werth, who ultimately offered him a job at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV). Nartker made the move to Las Vegas, Nevada in July of 1985. Dr. Nartker and Dr. Taghva started the UNLV Information Science Research Institute and did experimental research on Optical Character Recognition (OCR) for the Department of Energy (DOE). They invented many metrics never seen before, including a metric called Nonstop Word Accuracy.