Tom was born in 1990 in Brno, Czechia but spent a part of his childhood in River Edge, New Jersey in the United States. During his high-school years at Gymnázium Vídeňská in Brno, he was torn between science (being a successful competitor in the Chemistry Olympiad and other science competitions) and ballroom dancing (he competed as a member of the Kometa Brno dance sport club in standard and latin-american dances). Fortunately, science won and Tom went on to obtain a bachelor’s and master’s degree in organic chemistry at Masaryk University in Brno. Subsequently, he was tempted to return to the tri-state area and moved to New York City to study at Columbia University. As an Alfred Bader Fellow under the supervision of Prof. Dali Sames, Tom obtained a Ph.D. in chemical neuroscience, developing probes for targeted voltage imaging. During the raging Covid pandemic, Tom managed to move back to Europe for a postdoc at ETH Zürich. As a Marie-Curie Fellow under the supervision of Prof. Helma Wennemers, Tom studied the folding of synthetic collagen. After winning several independent grants (ETH Career Seed Award, SNSF Spark Grant, and the Branco Weiss Fellowship), Tom was promoted to a senior scientist. In January 2025, Tom joined the faculty at Masaryk University as an assistant professor at the Department of Chemistry, where he physically moved his lab in October of the same year. His research interests include self-assembling peptides and chemical biology probes for targeted biomolecule editing using the principles of induced proximity.