Tom joined the School of Chemical Engineering and Analytical Science at The University of Manchester in January 2013 as a Lecturer, and was promoted to Senior Lecturer in 2017, and then Reader in 2022. He was recently the Discipline Head of Education for Chemical Engineering (2019-2022) where he was responsible for running the accredited undergraduate and postgraduate programmes within the department.

He is a member of the Chemical Engineering Education Innovation Centre and his research focuses on how students learn during practical classes, focusing on how they prepare and how they interact with teaching materials as well as their engagement with rich media and online flexible learning interactive materials. 

He is also involved with research on mixing and the scale-up of formulated product manufacturing. This research combines real-time on-line measurements during large scale experiments with multi-scale computational modelling and rheology to improve knowledge of process equipment operation.

He previously worked at Durham University as a Post-doctoral Research Associate as a member of the Biophysical Sciences Institute (2011-2013), funded by the EPSRC with Prof. Tom McLeish and Dr. Martin Cann focusing on the super-coarse-graining of protein and ligand binding.

Prior to this, he graduated with a PhD in Chemical Engineering from The University of Manchester in 2011 funded by EPSRC and Unilever. This project focused on the processing and manufacture of formulated products.

My current research is focused around pedagogical research, including:

• Understanding student preparation for activities
• Student use of rich-media material
• Authentic assessment practice and teamworking

Other research on the engineering of soft matter systems, includes:

• Emulsion preparation and theory
• Mixing theory
• Process Tomography