Tom is a software engineer at MBARI. His interests include software and applications for autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) and autonomous surface vehicles, including navigation and tracking, adaptive sampling, and development of small low-power cytometers and microscopes for use by microbial oceanographers. He is also interested in standard protocols for marine sensor interfaces and networks, and helped to standardize the OGC PUCK interface originally developed at MBARI. Tom has been working with science colleagues to use Android devices for “crowd-sourcing” and data acquisition applications.

Tom’s educational background is in geology and geochemistry. For most of his professional career he has been a software engineer, usually working on scientific applications. Prior to joining MBARI, Tom helped develop a spacecraft instrument known as the Thermal Emission Spectrometer (“TES”), which is designed to measure properties of the Martian surface and atmosphere from orbit around Mars. TES was successfully launched on November 7, 1996 as part of the Mars Global Surveyor mission payload, and arrived in Mars orbit on September 11, 1997. Tom also helped design the mission planning system for a joint US/Japan instrument known as “ASTER”, on the TERRA Earth-orbiting spacecraft.