Thomas obtained his Ph.D. from the University of Georgia with Wayne Parrott, developing several molecular tools for soybean biotechnology. He moved in 2014 to Greg Martin’s lab at the Boyce Thompson Institute for his postdoc, where he started developing technology around CRISPR screens in plants. In 2016 he started the Plant Genome Editing group at the VIB-UGent Center for Plant Systems Biology. In 2022 he was appointed Associate Professor at the University of Gent. His group is focused on developing easy-to-use genome editing systems for all kinds of plant species, specifically focused on making large-scale gene knockouts and base editing.