Thomas grew up in Greenville, NC before going to high school at the North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics in Durham and then obtaining a B.S. in Chemistry from the University of Alabama. He participated in undergraduate research with Dr. Timothy Snowden at UA developing a PROTAC system targeting a vital enzyme in HIV as well as with Dr. Robert Hughes (a Waters lab alumnus!) at East Carolina University engineering enzyme immobilization systems onto solid support materials for TEV protease and protein kinase A.

After graduating in May 2022, Thomas returned home to NC to become a graduate student in the organic division at UNC-Chapel Hill where he joined the Waters group that Fall. Over the coming years, he hopes to gain more expertise in biological techniques while also providing an additional organic-focused perspective in the lab. When not in the lab, he is often learning and writing music for the guitar and keyboard, jogging, and working on convincing himself that getting a grad school cat would be a good idea.