Thomas Reardon joined Michigan State University (MSU) in 1992 in a tenure stream appointment. Tom was named Fellow of the AAEA in 2014. He was also competitively selected as a prestigious 1000 Talents Program Scholar (with association with Renmin University of China 2012-2014), and a Distinguished Faculty at MSU in 2009, and an Academic Program Fellow at the FAO Latin American Regional Office in 1999.

Before coming to MSU, Tom was a Research Fellow at International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) from 1986-1991 in Washington DC. He was a Rockefeller Foundation Post-Doctoral Fellow attached to IFPRI, based in Burkina Faso from 1984 to 1986. Tom is co-Principal Investigator (co-PI) of the new Food Security Policy project funded by USAID and led by MSU. He received his Ph.D. from University of California at Berkeley, and Masters from Columbia University and the University of Nice, France.

Tom has extensive research experience on food industry transformation, in particular the "supermarket revolution," as well as the "Quiet Revolution in value chains in developing countries" featuring the modernization of small farms and transformation of the retail, wholesaling, processing, and cold storage sectors. He has studied transformation in the value chains of rice, horticulture, dairy, and fish in Asia and Latin America for the past 15 years, undertaking detailed field surveys of many thousands of rural and urban supply chain actors, as well as the rise of agricultural mechanization out-sourcing services.