Tomás hails from Dungarvan Co. Waterford. He originally graduated from Trinity College Dublin in 2005 with a BA in genetics. He completed his PhD in molecular neuroscience with Seth Grant at the University of Cambridge and the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in 2009. His thesis work was supported by a Wellcome Trust PhD Fellowship. Following a year as Junior Research Fellow at Wolfson College, University Cambridge, he relocated to the USA to work as a Postdoctoral Researcher in the group of Susumu Tonegawa (Nobel Laureate, 1987) at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) (2010-2016). At MIT he was centrally involved in the development of novel genetic methods that allow for the labelling and manipulation of specific memory engrams in the rodent brain. This work was supported by Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) and RIKEN Brain Sciences Institute, Japan.
He started his research group in 2016 at Trinity College Dublin, where he is Assistant Professor of Neuroscience. Tomás also holds a joint faculty position at the Florey Institute of Neuroscience and Mental Health at the University of Melbourne, Australia. His research is supported by a European Research Council (ERC) Starting Grant, a Science Foundation Ireland (SFI) President of Ireland Young Researcher Award (PIYRA), and a Jacobs Foundation Fellowship. Outside of science, Tomás’ interests include travel, reading, philosophy, and politics.
‘What is the future of human evolution?’, June 2019.
What is the future of human evolution? As a species, Homo sapiens is only about 100,000 years old. At some point in our early evolution we developed an innate capacity for language that has enabled our apparent success as a species. During this brief moment of evolutionary time humans became the dominant species on the planet. Our population and behaviour is rapidly evolving, not at a biological level, but at a cultural one. Language and the outsourcing of information has lead to our runaway pace of cultural change that far outstrips the pace of evolution by natural selection. In my lecture, I will argue that cultural evolution can be rightly considered as a continuation of biological evolution, and furthermore as a means to directing future evolution by natural and cultural selection. I will argue that our instincts are formed by ‘copying’ pre-existing memories, and that it may eventually be possible for our future evolution to be driven not just by factors important for basic survival and reproduction rate, but also by our culture and education.”
