Tom Weis is an Assistant Professor in the Industrial Design department at the Rhode Island School of Design. Weis works with a team of faculty to guide graduate students through their year-long thesis projects. His undergraduate courses include such topics as advanced prototyping, gun violence prevention, aquaponics and global security issues. His work has been featured in such places as the Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum, Time magazine’s Best Inventions of 2010 and Mass General Hospital’s Russell MD Museum of History and Innovation.

Since 2015, Weis has explored how design and creativity might work to reduce nuclear threats. He has presented at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, The International Atomic Energy Agency and has led collaborative workshops between design students and cadets at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point and with teams at Sandia National Laboratories. Weis initiated a Global Security Fellowship at RISD funded by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. Tom has kept a home in coastal Maine since the late 1990’s when he moved there to pursue an apprenticeship building traditional wooden boats.