Tom Varberg is a physical chemist. His area of research is chemical physics, specifically the molecular spectroscopy and electronic structure of gaseous free radicals and transition metal compounds in the optical and far-infrared regions. He is also interested in the spectroscopy of large organic molecules of astronomical interest He received his B.A. in chemistry with honors from Hamline University (St. Paul, MN) in 1985 and his Ph.D. in physical chemistry from MIT (Cambridge, MA) in 1990. He had postdoctoral appointments at NIST (Boulder, CO) and the University of Oxford (Oxford, UK) as a NATO Fellow before he began his academic career at Macalester College in 1992. He has had sabbatical appointments at NIST, the University of British Columbia (Canada), and the University of Sydney (Australia).