Thomas Talhelm participated in How Much Should Clean Air Cost? Innovating Affordable DIY Purifiers. They are otherwise unassociated with EPIC.

Thomas Talhelm studies how culture affects the way we behave. One of his recent major projects was studying how rice and wheat agriculture have given northern and southern China two very different cultures. His research has appeared in a variety of publications including Science, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, and Current Directions in Psychological Science.

Thomas lived in China for five years teaching high school in Guangzhou as a Princeton in Asia fellow, as a freelance journalist in Beijing, and most recently as a Fulbright scholar and an NSF Graduate Research Fellow. While living in Beijing, Thomas founded Smart Air, a social enterprise that ships low-cost air purifiers to help people breathe clean air without shelling out thousands of dollars for expensive purifiers.

Thomas earned his Ph.D. in social psychology from the University of Virginia and a B.A. with Highest Honors in psychology and Spanish from the University of Michigan.