Thomas Bickford

Thomas Bickford is the Director of STEM outreach for the College of Science, Technology, and Health. Tom has spent his career either teaching, administering, or practicing engineering and education. Most recently he was the Director of the non-profit STEM outreach entity, Maine Robotics. Before that he served as the Director of the Agent Institute at the University of Maine and the Assistant Director of the Center for Distance Education and Telemedicine at the University of Texas Health Science Center in San Antonio.

While at Maine Robotics, Tom oversaw the continued development of Maine’s largest k-12 STEM outreach program, eventually reaching over 20,000 students and over 650,000 contact hours with the Maine students enrolled in the different programs.

Tom’s graduate work included building the world’s first ATM (asynchronous transfer mode) telemedicine system, both constructing and programming the system under an NTIA grant. Eventually connecting the major medical centers of UNC and Duke with each other and two of their sending hospitals in rural North Carolina.

As an educator, Tom has taught math, science, and computer science from the 6th grade up through the collegiate level, as well as holding hundreds of workshops and personally led over 70 weeks of summer technology camp.

While Tom holds no degree in Computer Science, he has been programming since 1979 and can program in over a dozen languages.

Tom is an avid technologist and tinkerer and builds computers or 3D prints to keep occupied when time allows, he is also a bicycle enthusiast and Zwifter (online cycling).