Thomas Papathomas was born in 1949 in Kastoria, Macedonia, Greece. He left Kastoria after he graduated from the local high school in 1967, and he received his BS, MS, and PhD from Columbia University in 1971, 1972, and 1977, respectively, all from the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. His PhD thesis was on the solution of the eigenvalue problem for sparse systems and networks. He was a member of the technical staff from 1977 to 1982, a supervisor of the AC Control Systems Group from 1982 to 1983, and a member of the research staff in the Visual Perception Research Department, headed by Bela Julesz, from 1983 to 1989, all at AT&T Bell Laboratories. He holds 3 U.S. patents, and won the Best Paper Award of the IEEE Transactions on Industrial Electronics in 1986.

He joined Rutgers in 1989 as an Associate Professor (promoted to full Professor in 1997) in the Department of Biomedical Engineering and is the Associate Director of the Laboratory of Vision Research. His research interests are in human and machine vision, neural mechanisms in vision, image processing, imaging systems, and scientific visualization techniques. He is investigating the mechanisms that underlie the perception of visual motion, stereopsis, texture, and the deployment of attention in vision. In particular, he studies the role of visual attributes (color, luminance, shape, spatial frequency, etc.) in perception, with the ultimate goal of developing quantitative models of biological mechanisms in these modalities.

He is the editor-in-chief of Early Vision and Beyond, a volume of interdisciplinary research in psychophysics, neurophysiology, and computational vision, published by MIT Press in 1995. He has designed several exhibits in science museums, and his work was exhibited at the New York Arts Biennial in 1997. He is a member of the Editorial Board of the International Journal of Imaging Systems and Technology, 1993 - present.