Tom Van der Stocken is a professor of Ecology at VUB since October 2022 and a research affiliate at the NASA-Caltech Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) since 2014. His research interests include tropical wetland ecology and biogeography, global change biology, coastal and ocean studies, with a strong affinity for interdisciplinary and multiscale-multimethod projects. Methods used in his projects include numerical modeling, remote sensing, exprimental (in situ and ex situ), conceptual, meta-analysis, and citizen science.

His current research activities focus on the response of coastal wetlands to global change and the role of these wetlands in the dynamics of the climate system. For these projects, he collaborates with partners internationally, including NASA-Caltech, the Moss Landing Marine Laboratories (MLML), and the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). In 2022, he became a member of the Young Academy of Belgium, an interuniversity association that reaches out to authorities and the public, and focuses on science communication, interdisciplinarity, internationalization, and policy. 

He previously was a Marie Skłodowska-Curie fellow (2020-2022) and a postdoctoral scholar at the California Institute of Technology and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (2017-2019). He is a contributor to the development and science applications of the Estimating the Circulation and Climate of the Ocean (ECCO) Project and the development and implementation of global coastal maps that helped guiding the Surface Water and Ocean Topography (SWOT) mission observations strategy. 

Trained as a Physical Geographer at VUB and KULeuven, he completed a PhD (2015, VUB, ULB) that focused on the ecology and biogeography of mangrove forests. During this time, he was selected to participate in the NASA/JPL Visiting Student Researchers Program (JVSRP). His PhD was awarded the 2020 Ignace Vanderschueren PhD Prize. 

In 2012 and 2013, he conducted research at the Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research (NIOZ) and was affiliated with the Kenya Marine and Fisheries Research Institute (KMFRI, 2012).