Tom graduated with a Master’s Degree in Biochemistry from University of Bath in 2003. During this time he discovered a passion for structural biology whilst on a 6 month placement at the ESRF in Grenoble, France. Following this he gained a PhD in Biophysics from the University of Leeds centred on developing new tools for observing protein dynamics using biomolecular NMR. Wanting to focus on computational methods in 2008 he moved to Utrecht in the Netherlands to PostDoc in the group of Piet Gros and developed phenix.ensemble_refinement, combining x-ray structure refinement with molecular dynamics simulations to reveal protein dynamics from crystallography.
In 2013 he joined the CCP-EM Core Team and the Science and Technology Facilities Council at the Rutherford Appleton national Laboratory. He is now the Group Leader of Molecular and Cellular Electron Microscopy group in the Scientific Computing department and leader of the CCP-EM Core Team. He works with a team of internal and external software developers to make the CCP-EM software suite – a set of tools for processing biomolecular cryoEM data and producing high resolution maps of proteins used by both academic- and industry-based researchers. Out of the lab he is normally found chasing after his kids or escaping on his bike.
