Injuries from a motor vehicle accident while a student at The Ohio State University resulted in Tom becoming a below knee amputee in 1974. His experiences during this period shaped not only his career choice as a prosthetist, but also the philosophy of care that has become the standard at the company he eventually founded.

Following a period of rehabilitation, Tom attended and graduated from Northwestern University’s Prosthetic and Orthotic Center, affiliated with Northwestern University Medical School and the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago. He completed his residency at Helen Hayes Hospital’s Center for Rehabilitation Technology, and was the senior staff prosthetist when he left Helen Hayes Hospital in 1989.

By this time, Tom was feeling a growing desire to engage patients in a more intimate, private-practice setting. As a result, he founded Prosthetic & Orthotic Associates in Middletown, NY in November of that year. Since its beginnings on Ballard Road, the company has been anchored in Middletown, in the heart of the Catskill Mountains and Hudson River Valley. As a response to an expanding regional population, as well as increasing numbers of regional hospitals, physicians and therapists adding Prosthetic & Orthotic Associates (POA) to their rehabilitation resource teams, POA opened additional clinics in Kingston, NY; Poughkeepsie, NY; New York, NY; and Mahwah, NJ.

Over the years, Tom has continued to refine his professional expertise with an emphasis on experience with leading edge prosthetic technologies, such as microprocessor controlled knees and “bionic” hands and fingers for persons with unique upper limb prosthetic needs. Having spent 3 years as Director of Clinical Operations and Communications for the UK based company Touch Bionics, a world leader in upper limb prosthetic technology development, he now is applying the unique experience he gained as part of the development team of the ProDigits/iLimb Digits system to clients in the US and elsewhere in the world.

In addition to his primary clinical focus on upper limb amputee care, Tom divides his time between the management of POA and speaking on the topic of upper limb prostheses to surgeons, physiatrists, occupational and physical/hand therapists as well as case managers and payers involved in their care. His work has been published in The Atlas of Amputations and Limb Deficiencies, Surgical, Prosthetic, and Rehabilitation Principles, Third Edition, published by the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons, Oct. 2004. Tom also provides expert witness testimony and life care plans for organizations in the US and elsewhere in the world representing upper limb amputees.