Tom concurrently leads the High-Performance Computational Materials Science Group and the Advanced Strategic Computing Constitutive Properties Program Element at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. He has two B.S. degrees from Cornell University—in mechanical and aerospace engineering and materials science and engineering—and a Ph.D. in mechanical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His awards include a National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate Fellowship from the Department of Defense.

Tom’s research has been at the forefront of using advanced computational capabilities to understand the behavior of nuclear materials. For instance, he has gained new insight into dislocation dynamics and how nuclear materials deform and fail by combining advances in supercomputing with materials experimentation and characterization. His many publications encompass a wide range of nuclear material aspects, such as ultra-deep-burnup, the x-ray diffraction of crystalline materials under high pressure, modeling material strength for high-energy-density physics, investigating dislocation patterning (including the visualization of simulations) and understanding dislocation interactions with radiation-induced defects. Tom also holds a patent relating to nuclear fuel.