I am a second-year PhD Student at MIT’s Sloan School of Management, in the Information Technology group, currently working with Dean Eckles. Before that, I spent half a year in industry as a software engineer at Amazon.

Previously, I graduated with a Master’s of Science from Stanford’s Management Science and Engineering Department, where I conducted research with Ramesh Johari, Michael Bernstein, and Nikhil Garg. I did my undergrad at the University of Toronto with a double major in mathematics and computer science, where I did research assistantships with Kate Larson and Peter Marbach.

You can email me at thoma98 (at) mit.edu.

Research Interests

I am interested in analyzing how we spend time on online platforms, particularly online marketplaces and social media platforms. I use methods from statistics, computer science, and econometrics to both build models of how we use these online services, and to design experiments to validate thsoe models.

I have done full-time software engineering work at Amazon, and engineering internships at Amazon and Perpetua.

Updates

• July 2025: My rating systems paper was published in the proceedings of ICWSM 2025. The official version can be found here.

• July 2024: My work on trade-offs in rating systems was accepted to ICWSM 2025! You can find the arXiV link here.

• April 2024: I accepted a PhD offer from the MIT Sloan School of Management! I start September of 2024.