He studied at the University of Cape Town and Johns Hopkins University, and previously taught at Stellenbosch University. He is an anthropologist of southern Africa with a particular interest in health, labour, and kinship, especially nutrition and pharmaceuticals and their attendant forms of value and life. His fieldwork to date has been in South Africa. His doctoral work (Johns Hopkins, 2012) focused on timber plantation labourers in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, and the substances and concepts of health, strength, and life that are constituted in the production of value. Along with Lindsey Reynolds, Thomas developed Transcriptions – a forum on HIV/AIDS and global health, on Somatosphere.