Thank you so much to Tom for taking the time to share his story. It’s been wonderful to see how he continues to carry his passions and curiosity with him, and we’re so excited to see where his career takes him next!
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“I really just love it. I come into work every day delighted to be here,” says Tom Wagg, a NULS alumnus from the class of 2016. Today, Tom is a Flatiron Research Fellow in New York City, but his journey to the stars began as a curious kid willing to learn and soak up as much as he could during his time at school.
For Tom, his time at school was defined by an exciting variety. While many know him for his scientific expertise, he spent a significant portion of his school life under the spotlight. “I think probably, the most exciting times that I remember come from doing drama performances,” he recalls. His repertoire was vast: Bugsy Malone, Beauty and the Beast, playing Fagin in Oliver, and Rosencrantz in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead.
This mix of interests wasn’t a burden—it was a strategy. “I also found that it almost helped having more things to do the balancing,” Tom explains. “Say I had some difficult homework, I could then go and play a hockey match, and then I would come back and I would have the answer in my head… I actually think it makes you better at the other things.” It is a habit that has stuck; Tom still enjoys playing hockey now in New York, still carrying a piece of home with him.
The values and lessons he learned at NULS are things he still carries with him today: “The driving curiosity and a love of learning is something that I really gained because I just had so much encouragement and so many lovely teachers.”
He recalls teachers going far beyond their job descriptions to fuel his interests: “I said to my physics teacher, ‘I’d like to do astronomy.’ He said, ‘Okay, we’ll just work on that in lunchtimes together.’… I talked to my Latin teacher. She said, ‘Oh, you like Latin. Why don’t we do ancient Greek and lunch, and you can come in early in the mornings.’… That’s just insane.”
Ultimately, he says, “It’s really kind of helped me have this nurtured love of learning new things and having a comfort with just trying a lot of different things at the same time.”
Tom’s path to the Ivy League was famously sparked by a piece of work experience suggested by one of his teachers at NULS. It was during this placement that Tom discovered a planet. “It was awesome. It was shocking. And I just assumed I did something wrong at first, and then I slowly convinced myself I was right.”
While that discovery made headlines, his application to Harvard was actually a “completely random off the cuff decision” after a rejection from Oxford. Supported by a team of NULS teachers who wrote letters of recommendation on just two weeks’ notice, Tom found himself doing an interview for Harvard in Manchester Piccadilly Station.
“I just got on the train, expecting this huge, dramatic thing. And they sat down and they went, ‘so, tell me what you like doing outside school.’ It was just conversation.” For Tom, this was a perfect example of how Harvard differs from other top-tier institutions. “They do like a holistic, well rounded view of you,” he explains.
Reflecting on his acceptance, he remains humble: “I think the thing that got me in at the end of the day, was blind luck… Harvard has a ridiculous number of applicants, and far more are qualified to get in than get in… the reason I got in was the luckiest thing that happened in my life, which is that I found a planet on work experience.”
After completing his degree at Harvard and a PhD at the University of Washington, Tom moved to New York in June 2025. As a Flatiron Research Fellow, his daily life is a mix of high-level coding and collaboration. He spends much of his time writing simulations that evolve millions of stars from birth to death, tracing their trajectories through the galaxy until present day. This includes software packages like LEGWORK and his more recent project, Cogsworth – alongside discussing new discoveries and research papers with his colleagues. “It’s just magic, isn’t it? I feel like you never quite get over that feeling of a child of thinking about stars and galaxies and space, Just the fact that someone pays me to think about this, and I get to just come in every day and think about stars, is absurd to me,” he admits. “It’s a wonderful life.”
He still carries on with that encouraged curiosity—perhaps no longer through Latin and drama, but by dipping his toe into various disciplines within astrophysics. “I work on lots of different projects at the same time… I have a breadth of the astronomy that I do. I don’t just do stars, I do gravitational waves and dynamics. I think I have that comfort in a lot of different fields because I was encouraged in school to do a lot of things.”
Binary stars is his current obsession—systems with two stars orbiting each other. “Almost every single one [large star] has at least one companion. You can imagine this does all sorts of fun things. They interact with each other. They can smush together and merge—one of them can explode and send the other one flying.”
A career highlight came during his PhD when he secured a grant from NASA for his research on binary stars – a feat usually reserved for professors. “I was walking down Fifth Avenue in New York at the time, and I got a message from my PhD supervisor… and he just said, ‘check your email’ with a smiley face.”
Science, Tom admits, is 90% frustration. “I would say 90% of the time I’m sitting here thinking, ‘Why am I so dumb? Why doesn’t this work?'” His solution is to pivot. “Instead of just working on one project, I will often work on two to three at the same time… I’ll just leave it. I’ll go work on this other thing. And often, by the time I come back to it, I’m more refreshed.”
He also learned to embrace unexpected results through what a colleague calls a “judo flip.” If a hypothesis is proven wrong, Tom explains, “You can then rephrase that, and you can say… ‘Despite the uncertainties here, you don’t actually need to be concerned in this realm of observations.'”
When asked what advice he would give to students currently at NULS, Tom’s message is simple:
Follow your passion: “Do what you love doing… It’s helped me so much to be in a career where I don’t feel like I’m working.”
Embrace the breadth: “I did Latin at A-Level, even though it didn’t make any sense… It was the thing that I enjoyed doing… it helps distract me from having to do a constant bunch of very mathematical things.”
Learn to code: “Knowing and learning a bit about how to code, I think is very relevant in almost every field these days.”
Don’t be intimidated: “Scientists are less scary than you think they are… If someone reads my paper and sends me an email, asking me a question about it, I love it.”
Ultimately, Tom’s success stems from a mindset he developed at a young age—that driving curiosity and his love of learning. “My superpower in science is not that I’m the best at it,” he concludes. “I’m not the best at it, but I can work really hard because I love what I’m doing.”
Thank you so much to Tom for taking the time to share his story. It’s been wonderful to see how he continues to carry his passions and curiosity with him, and we’re so excited to see where his career takes him next!
Louis Bond: “The site of the camp was much larger than I had ever expected. Much of the camp was destroyed, but there were the cabin like structures at the front of the complex which were tiny in comparison to the number of people who were forced to stay in them. At the rear of the
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