David Thomson is a transplant surgeon and critical care specialist at Groote Schuur Hospital and the University of Cape Town. He completed his undergraduate training in 2002 at the University of Kwa-Zulu Natal and went on to specialise in surgery at the University of Cape Town completing his FCS(SA) in 2011 and MMed(Surgery) in 2012 and Critical Care in 2015. He currently works as a critical care subspecialist and as a surgeon in the liver and renal transplantation unit, leading the ECMO program.

His interests are medical education and system improvement. He created the massive open online course Organ Donation: From Death to Life hosted on Coursera.org to improve education around organ donation and transplantation. He is a past President of the Southern African Transplantation Society and led development on a report on Organ and Tissue Donation in South Africa: Creating a National Strategic Roadmap in collaboration with the International Society for Organ Donation and Procurement. He worked on the World Brain Death Project and is the lead author on the South African Guidelines for Determination of Death published in 2021.