Tom received his bachelor’s degrees from UC Berkeley and while there worked in Dan Koshland’s lab purifying the aspartate receptor from both E. coli and S. typhimurium which were used for biochemical and crystallization studies. He then moved to Columbia University where he received his PhD in Cellular, Molecular and Biophysical studies for his work in Wayne Hendrickson’s lab on the structure of the E. coli mutagenesis protein UmuD’. He did a postdoc with Tom Terwilliger at Los Alamos National Laboratory and solved two structures in one of the first publicly funded structural genomics programs. Tom then moved to San Diego to help start up a biotech company, SGX Pharmaceuticals, where he was director of structural biology. 3 years later, after growing SGX from 5 to 145 people, helping secure almost $85M in venture capital funding and developing new methods for high throughput structure determination, he moved to OpenEye Scientific Software, where he was vice president of proteomics. The major product from his work there, Afitt- a software program for fitting chemically realistic compounds into crystallographic data, was released in 2006 and is now a standard software package in many pharmaceutical and biotech companies. In 2006, Tom moved to CSIRO to become a Senior Principle Research Scientist. He now leads the Biophysics group and his principal research focus is in the area of structural biology and protein interactions. Since 2009, he has published 38 papers on a variety of topics, many in the area of fragment based screening and structure based drug design.