Primary Job Title Founder and Scientific Consultant Primary Organization 
Hawaii Biotech
Location Hawaii, United States, North America Regions Asia-Pacific (APAC), Western US Gender Male
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After starting college at Texas A&M, he graduated from the University of Chicago with a BS, and quickly earned his PhD at the same institution in 1962 in Zoology. His early work focused on cell-cell adhesion in sponges, initiating seminal work in understanding cell adhesion properties basic to the rise of metazoans and the role of calcium in
cell interactions. Upon finishing his doctorate, he accepted a postdoctoral fellowship at MIT for two years, then became an assistant professor there from 1963 to 1966. While at MIT, he published the fifth paper of his career in Science, a symbol of the auspicious publication record he would eventually accrue. He then spent five years at the University of California at San Diego as a faculty member where he published a landmark paper on species-specific cell recognition of sponges in Nature, in 1970. In that same year he moved to Hawaiʻi, where he would spend the rest of his life, to join the Kewalo Marine Lab at the University of Hawai`i at Mānoa (UHM).
At UHM, Tom was widely recognized as the first and only molecular biologist in the university at the time. He continued his study of marine invertebrates, using this system as a model to contribute to unlocking the mysteries of eukaryotic translation. This yielded several high-level publications in the highest ranking scientific journals, two in Nature and two in Cell. This interest in the basic genetics and embryology of marine invertebrates continued until his death. But Tom was a man of many interests and talents. During his time at UHM, he was part of the newly formed Cancer Research Center of Hawai’i in 1982, and served as its Interim Director from 1985 to 1988. He was very involved in graduate student training, and in 1994 he successfully competed for the first T32 training grant for graduate students at UHM.
