[2] Following his Physics Doctoral degree, Thomas served a Postdoctoral fellow at Purdue University, and Swiss Federal Institute of Technology ETH Zurich until 1987.
He held his next appointment as a Visiting Assistant Research Spectroscopist in the Department of Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) in 1987.
[16] He worked in a project focused on comparing differences in brain proton spectra between children and adolescents with bipolar disorder (BPD) and gender and age-matched normal controls.
[17] Thomas also evaluated the biochemical basis of depression in patients with type 2 diabetes, while using proton (1H) Magnetic Resonance Spectroscopy (MRS).
Results of his study suggested that alterations in terms of glutamate and glutamine levels in subcortical regions along with white matter changes in myo-inositol play a significant role in providing important neurobiological substrates of mood disorders.
[18] His 2007 study examined baseline 1HMRS spectra of bipolar depressed patients, with particular emphasis onto highlighting whether the level of cerebral metabolites changes after an open trial of lamotrigine, an anti-glutamatergic mood stabilizer.
[20] He also investigated the ability of magnetic resonance spectroscopy (MRS) to detect 2-HG production in order to non-invasively identify patients with IDH1 mutant brain tumors.