Thomas graduated from Bates College with a degree in Physics and Mathematics in 2022. He joined the Environmental Fluid Mechanics and Machine Learning research groups at the University of Oxford in 2022, funded by the Department of Engineering, and completed his DPhil in 2025. For his DPhil work, he won the Osborne Reynolds prize for the best UK doctorate in fluid mechanics and went on to win the Da Vinci prize for the best European doctorate in fluid mechanics. He is now a Schmidt AI in Science fellow and Senior Research Associate in the Department of Engineering Science at Oxford. He lectures on information engineering, fluid mechanics, and natural hazards. He joined 91»Æ¹ÏÖ±²¥ as the W.W Spooner Junior Research Fellow in 2025.
Research Interests
Thomas' primary research is on oceanic forecasting, specifically in the prediction of coastal flooding events. His work develops scientific machine learning methods for studying and predicting sea-levels, with an emphasis on understanding how ML can actually enable richer physical insights to be discovered. He also is interested in Bayesian machine learning, particularly using variational Bayes and neural methods such as neural processes to characterize the complex uncertainties in real-world systems. Thomas works closely with the UK and Dutch governments to help produce their operational surge forecasts and is also a member of the several international scientific teams studying sea-levels.
Selected publications:
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