Thomas is an inventor of the Cat-HTRTM technology, and Co-Founder of Licella Holdings. He is Professor of Chemistry at the University of Sydney and served as Founding Director of the $150m Australian Institute of Nanoscale Science and Technology. In 2011 he was elected youngest Foreign Member of the Academia Europea as well as Fellow of the Australian Academy of Sciences, the Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering, the Royal Australian Chemical Institute (RACI) and, in 2014, of the Royal Society of NSW.

He is Founding Chairman of Gelion Technologies. He serves on the editorial/advisory boards of ten international journals and has received many awards, including the Le Févre Prize of the Australian Academy of Sciences (2007), the RACI Applied Research Award (2011), the RACI Weickhardt Medal for Economic Contributions (2012), the RACI R. K. Murphy Medal for Industrial Chemistry (2018) the Eureka Prize for Leadership in Innovation and Science (2018), the Federation of Asian Chemical Societies’ Contribution to Economic Development Award (2019), the Australian Prime Minister’s Prize for Innovation (2020), the Australian Academy of Science’s David Craig Medal (2021) and the Australian Financial Review Sustainability Prize (2021).