Tom's research examines the lives of rural resource experts and the intimate attachments that experts develop to places and people within spaces undergoing radical environmental and institutional changes. His first book, The Ends of Research: Indigenous and Settler Science after the War in the Woods (Duke University Press 2023), is a historical ethnography of twenty-first century environmental deregulation in British Columbia, Canada, and its effects on both Indigenous and settler researchers’ struggles to maintain long-term forestry experiments and sovereignty projects in the wake of government downsizing. With Denielle Elliott, Dian Million, and Candis Callison, he is also co-editor of the volume Unsettling Technoscience: Theorizing Indigenous and Settler Science, Technology and Society (forthcoming, Duke University Press). Tom’s current project examines the emergence of new critical minerals exploration and research and development initiatives in Australia, Malaysia, and the American Mountain West. Prior to joining the Department of Sociology and Anthropology as a Presidential Young Professor in 2023, Tom was assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology at Johns Hopkins University, and a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University's Weatherhead Center for International Affairs. Tom obtained his Ph.D in the History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology and Society program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and his research has been supported by the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, and the U.S. National Science Foundation.