Tom Murphy is the High Altitude and Space Monitoring Project Leader within the Nonproliferation and International Security Research and Development Program.
Tom received his B. S. in Physics in 1983 from the California Institute of Technology, where he was a member of Fleming House. He did is graduate work at Princeton University, receiving his Ph. D. in 1988 for a thesis entitled "Tokamak Diagnostics Using Nuclear Techniques." This work involved the measurement of neutrons produced in the Tokamak Fusion Test Reactor (TFTR) and alpha particles produced in PLT at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL).
Following graduate school, Tom was a post-doc at the University of California, San Diego, where he performed experiments with positron plasmas. He measured annihilation rates of positrons on noble gases and organic molecules, and studied the mechanisms for trapping of positrons in electrostatic traps.
Tom then spent four years at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory working in the ICF program as a member of the Particle Diagnostics Group on Nova, where he developed neutron time-of-flight detectors with fast time response, studied neutron production methods in the interaction of lasers with deuterated plastic slabs, and performed experiments in drive symmetry in vacuum and gas-filled Nova hohlraums.
In September 1995, Tom left LLNL to begin work as the Team Leader for the newly-formed Diagnostics & Optical Science Team (now called the Diagnostic Engineering and Operations Team) in the Plasma Physics Group at Los Alamos National Laboratory.
Following a reorganization of teams within P-24 in October 1997, Tom became Team Leader of the Inertial Confinement Fusion/Ignition team. With the departure of ICF Program Manager Melissa Cray in April 1998, Tom became Acting ICF Program manager, a role he filled until April 1999, when he returned to P-24, again as Team Leader of the Inertial Confinement Fusion/Ignition team, and served as the Project Leader for Ignition Experiments in the Inertial Confinement Fusion and Radiation Physics Program.
In October 2001, Tom joined the Space and Atmospheric Sciences Group (NIS-1) in the Nonproliferation and International Security Division as the Project Leader for High Altitude and Space Monitoring.