Appointment period: 1/10/2022 – 30/09/2025

Thomas E. Levy is Distinguished Professor of the Graduate Division, School of Social Sciences, and founder and co-Director of the Center for Cyber-Archaeology and Sustainability (CCAS) at the Qualcomm Institute, University of California, San Diego.  Levy is the inaugural holder of the Norma Kershaw Chair in the Archaeology of Ancient Israel and Neighboring Lands in the Department of Anthropology and Jewish Studies Program, and from 2016 to July 1, 2022, served as co-Director of the Scripps Center for Marine Archaeology (SCMA) at UC San Diego.   Tom is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and carries out marine archaeology fieldwork in Israel and Greece.

Tom spent forty years carrying out archaeological field work in the deserts of Israel and Jordan.  First certified as a scuba diver in 1969, in 2016 Levy shifted from terrestrial to marine archaeology with a focus on studying how coastal communities adapt to climate, environmental and cultural change throughout the Holocene period.   Since 2017, Tom has collaborated with Prof. Assaf Yasur-Landau and the Recanati Institute for Maritime Studies in underwater surveys and excavations off the Carmel coast of Israel.  Since 2020, Tom has served as Principal Investigator of a Koret Foundation (San Francisco) grant that has promoted collaboration between the University of California, San Diego and the University of Haifa around the topic of underwater archaeology.

Tom has published 17 books, over 250 scholarly articles and serves as Editor-in-Chief of the Equinox Publishing (UK) series, New Directions in Anthropological Archaeology.