Tom is a postdoc in Joanna Aizenberg's lab at Harvard funded by a Swiss National Science Foundation Postdoc. He started in October of 2018. He finished his Ph.D. in chemical engineering at the University of Michigan at the end of 2017; from 2016-2018 he worked at the Adolphe Merkle Institute in Fribourg, Switzerland under his Ph.D. advisor, Michael Mayer, who moved the lab there from Ann Arbor. Tom is interested in bio-inspired materials, bio-integrated electronics, active soft materials, sensors and actuators, electrophysiology, membrane biophysics, pore-forming peptides, self-assembly, hydrogels, crystallization, and much more.

He worked on a number of projects during his Ph.D., each having to do with the energetics of membrane permeation. He had considered both polymeric and phospholipid membrane systems, and my approach to each project was inspired by a natural system in some capacity. Before starting his Ph.D., Tom graduated with departmental honors in chemistry in the spring of 2012 from Northwestern University, where he minored in writing creative nonfiction. He'd been funded by a fellowship from the Cellular Biotechnology Training Program at U of M. He'd also worked at Sophion Bioscience in Copenhagen, Denmark and Eli Lilly & Co. in Indianapolis, Indiana.