Tom McCormick was an undergraduate major in Mathematics at the University of Pennsylvania, and got his doctorate in Operations Research at Stanford University. He spent six years at the IEOR Department at Columbia University, and the last 10 years in the Management Science Division at UBC. He is on sabbatical at SORIE at Cornell University this academic year.

His thesis at Stanford considered some problems in sparse matrices at the interface between numerical and combinatorial optimization. His recent research has focused on "generic" algorithms for network flow, with the idea of generalizing them to algorithms for more abstract models like submodular flow.

He was an organizer of IPCOV in Vancouver, and is an Associate Editor of Mathematical Programming. He served as Co-Chair of UBC's innovative Core course in their new MBA program, serves on the Advisory Board of BRAMSS (UBC's applied research bureau in Management Science), and will be Chair of the UBC Management Science Division starting next year.