Tom Higham is a Professor of Archaeological Science at the University of Oxford. He has worked in Oxford since 2001. Prior to this he worked and studied in his native New Zealand.

He specialises in radiocarbon dating using accelerator mass spectrometry, particularly the dating of archaeological sites back to around 50,000 years ago. He has extensive research and collaborative links with dozens of archaeologists, geneticists, geologists and earth scientists from a range of university and research groups, and works on archaeological sites across Eurasia, the Americas, Australasia, SE Asia and the Pacific.

He has written more than 260 refereed journal articles in his career.His research work since 2004 has focused on the extinction of Neanderthals and the dispersal of modern humans across Eurasia between 50-30,000 BP. He is one of the team working at the important Russian site of Denisova Cave, where a new species of humans was found in 2011.