Thomas Eugene Everhart FREng (born February 15, 1932, in Kansas City, Missouri)[1] is an American educator and physicist.

He held a Marshall Scholarship at Clare College, Cambridge, where he completed a PhD in Physics under Professor Charles Oatley in 1958.

[3] An initial prototype, the SEM1, had been developed by Dennis McMullen, who published his dissertation Investigations relating to the design of electron microscopes in 1952.

[6] Analyzing the electrons detected by the SEM, he reported that about 67% of the signal measured could be attributed to low energy secondaries from the specimen.

[10] Voltage contrast, the ability to detect variations in surface electrical potentials on a specimen, is now one of several imaging modes used for the characterization, diagnosis and failure analysis of semiconductors.

In 1963, Pease and Nixon incorporated the Everhart-Thornley detector into their prototype for the first commercial SEM, later developed as the Cambridge Scientific Instruments Mark I Stereoscan.

[4] In the 1960s, Wells, Everhart, and Matta built an advanced SEM for semiconductor studies and microfabrication at Westinghouse Laboratories in Pittsburgh.

They were able to combine signals so to more effectively examine multiple layers in active devices, an early example of EBIC imaging.

[15][16] From 1958-1978 Everhart was a professor and latterly department chairman of engineering and computer science, at the University of California at Berkeley.

[20] As Caltech's president, Everhart authorized the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) project, a large-scale experiment that seeks to detect gravitational waves and use them for fundamental research in physics and astronomy.

In 1989, he helped dedicate the Beckman Institute at Caltech, a research center for biology, chemistry, and related sciences.