Thomas Laux

Born with a congenital cataract, Tom had early exposure to the life-changingimpact of both science and relationships, building community with his local sight center in Cleveland. The son of two educators, Tom developed a deep love of learning and lively family dinners consisting of intellectual debates. Upon attending a rigorous magnet high school which largely prioritized test scores, Tom sought a community which instead valued humanity, social justice, and joy. This brought him to Swarthmore College, where he pursued opportunities to explore education and public mental health, punctuated by his junior year abroad in India, China, and South Africa studying the intersectionality of traditional and Western medicine. After graduating with his B.A. in psychology in 2014, Tom spent two years in Madaba, Jordan teaching high school chemistry and AP Psychology at King’s Academy international boarding school where he further cultivated his understanding of culture and pedagogy. In 2016, he deferred acceptance to medical school to work as a Medical Student Design Partner at the Penn State College of Medicine, helping to create and pilot and an innovative new medical school curriculum centered around early clinical exposure and design thinking. During medical school, Tom recognized that his dual passions of education and mental health made him a natural fit for psychiatry, and his personal experience with visual impairment provided a sense of connection for patients struggling with their own invisible disabilities. At Yale, Tom looks forward to further exploring how, implicitly and explicitly, we teach our patients, our colleagues, and ourselves about psychiatry and medicine more broadly. Outside of medicine, Tom loves sports analytics, watching his Philadelphia Eagles and Sixers, karaoke, Zumba, mindfulness food walks, and adventures with his new wife Lizzy and their dog, Norway.