Prior to his position as Head of the Office of the Resident Coordinator in Turkey, Tom was Humanitarian-Development-Peace Nexus Advisor to the RC/HC in Sudan and acting Head of RCO during the turmoil in Sudan in 2019.

Before that he worked for the Peer2Peer (formerly known as the Senior Transformative Agenda Implementation Team – STAIT); the Global Cluster on Early Recovery/UNDP as Inter-Agency Early Recovery Advisor, where he focused on supporting the integration of early recovery into the humanitarian response and on the development of durable solutions strategies for displaced people; for the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), i.a. on IDP protection; and for the UN Environment Programme focusing on reducing the environmental footprint of the humanitarian response.

Before joining the UN, Tom worked, among other, for the ICRC in Somalia and Sri Lanka; Pax Christi Flanders in Kosovo, Serbia and Northern Ireland; as advisor to the Minister President of the Government of Flanders; and as consultant for the Harvard Program on Humanitarian Policy and Conflict Research (HPCR) and the International Council of Voluntary Agencies (ICVA).

Tom wrote several articles, e.g. for the Forced Migration Review, and contributed to several guidance and policy documents on durable solutions, early recovery, the New Way of Working, and the Humanitarian-Development-Peace Nexus.

He is a former member of the Geneva Peace Building Platform Advisory Board.

Tom studied law at the Catholic University of Leuven (Belgium), and specialised in International Public Law at the Université II Pantheon-Assas, Paris.