Going against the wind

Tomasz coded under the handle Warlock in groups called Amnesty and Absence, and began organising parties of his own. Instead of writing viruses, he could use his skills to create visualisations and graphics, and “push the mathematics to the limits”. 

“In demoscene, the products are basically mathematics on steroids,” he says. “These machines were very slow, so we had to do lots of algorithmic tricks and hacks. It’s about pushing the limitations of the machine to deliver something that is inspiring and beautiful, and never boring anymore.”

Solving hard problems

Decades later, in an age of advanced technology, computing has changed beyond recognition – and it’s rarely described as boring. What hasn’t changed is Tomasz’s instinct to push it to its limits. 

The intervening years took him from Poland, via Japan, to Australia and his eventual landing place in Silicon Valley.  Since 2022, Tomasz has worked for NVIDIA, the California-based tech company whose full-stack infrastructure is powering the AI boom. 

His work there has centred on strategic engagement with researchers, connecting the company’s technology with the world’s leading scientists working on complex, computationally intensive problems. 

“The core mission of the team is to engage and accelerate breakthrough science,” says Tomasz, who has spent four years in leadership roles connecting NVIDIA platforms with the global research community. 

“That’s why I love this mission, because it’s bringing that ‘AI for good’ foundation, teaming up with research teams to understand their science problem and find the platform that will help them to move 10 times faster or 25 times faster or even a hundred times faster to find a solution.”

Speeding up scientific discovery is also a key goal of his latest project, where he leads the NVIDIA’s Lilly AI Lab, a collaboration with the pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly. The co-innovation lab is using artificial intelligence to address some of the hardest problems in drug discovery, pioneering robotics and physical AI to scale up medicine discovery and production. 

Getting to this point has taken Tomasz through more roles and disciplines than most experts encounter in a career. It also required a decision, early on, that he describes as "going against the wind". 

Different directions

Back in Poland at the end of high school, Tomasz was deciding what to study at university. 

For someone so obsessed with computers, the obvious choice was a computer science degree. But when he started looking at courses, he realised he already knew many of the things they were supposed to teach him. 

Years of poring over university-level textbooks to inform his hacking activities had given him an understanding of advanced algorithms, and subjects like linear algebra and calculus. He chose, instead, to enrol in a physics degree. 

“I picked physics because I didn’t particularly like physics at that time of my life,” says Tomasz with a grin. “Just to go against the wind.”

In the years that followed, going against the wind became a habit. 

As he was nearing the end of his master’s degree in Kraków, Tomasz fielded a 4am call from his former academic supervisor, who was visiting Japan for a research collaboration. He told him there was a PhD candidacy in Fukuoka that would suit him perfectly. 

Tomasz said he’d think about it, but his old professor was persistent. He called back several times that day. 

“I was thinking to myself, this is crazy – I know nothing about Japan, and I never wanted to leave Europe. But okay, I’ll just go and do this PhD and see what happens.”

On his eventual arrival in Japan, the culture shock was one thing. Then, at their first meeting, his professor explained that Japanese universities enforce mandatory retirement at 65, and he’d be gone well before a doctorate could be finished. 

Tomasz could move to another lab, but that would require learning to read and write Japanese first. Or he could stay, compressing his whole PhD into the time his supervisor had left. 

He chose to stay, meaning he’d need to produce double the usual publications. His supervisor would say to him: “I’m a professor and I work six and a half days a week. You’re a PhD student so you should work harder.” 

Over the ensuing years, Tomasz wrote 11 papers and presented at 21 conferences. It was a crazy time, he says, but he calls it the best of his life. 

“When you do stuff that you love in your work, you don’t work a single day. That’s honestly how I felt.” 

Connecting the unconnected

This ‘going against the wind’ philosophy continued to guide Tomasz’s decisions. 

After completing his PhD, he had a research job lined up in Brussels working on fusion physics simulations – a job he secured, somewhat strangely, without being interviewed. In preparation, he bought himself a calendar of Belgian beers he hoped to sample. 

But he changed his mind when two Australian offers arrived in one week – one in Melbourne, the other at James Cook University in Townsville. He chose the warmer climes of North Queensland. 

“They showed me all this beautiful footage, flying over the tropics,” Tomasz says. “As soon as I landed, I said, ‘Okay, this is my home’.”

In his two decades in Australia, Tomasz notched up an impressive list of achievements. He ran a research centre at UNSW, led a visual and hybrid analytics team at CSIRO, held adjunct professorial roles at several leading universities, chaired SIGGRAPH Asia (a leading computer graphics conference), and had a stint at Sydney’s Powerhouse Museum as part of an award-winning exhibition. 

The breadth of his experience is rare among academics – a conscious choice he has made repeatedly. A research career can be built in two distinct ways, he says. You could be hyper-focused and specialised, establishing a niche in one field. Or you could explore many different interests and be a generalist. 

“When you do many different things, you start to see the connections between disconnected things,” he says. 

“Sometimes you can apply the same solution to solve different problems in different fields. That’s just beautiful.”

But there are penalties to this pathway, he adds. 

“You don’t grow as fast, and when you’re working in different areas, it’s very hard to be recognised in one particular domain.”

This breadth still dictates his diary. This week, it’s the RSS robotics conference in Sydney. The next, a SIGGRAPH computer graphics conference in Los Angeles, followed by biology and AI workshops in yet another city. 

Yet Tomasz has no regrets. 

“They’re all completely different fields, but I love all of them equally.” 

Becoming a better person

Somewhere in the middle of all of this, Tomasz found the time to study business at ACU. 

In his years in academia, he’d seen people climb up the research ladder to become leaders, and noticed they didn’t always succeed. 

“Just because you’ve become a professor it doesn’t mean you’ll be a good leader,” he says. “There is a gap there.”

You could learn to lead through experience, but that took time. Tomasz felt he needed to learn the theory. 

He chose ACU for several reasons. The flexibility meant he could study outside of work hours, and as a Polish Catholic who grew up during the papacy of John Paul II, he saw the university’s values as similar to his own. 

While his time at ACU was short, he learned valuable lessons. 

“Not only how to become a more efficient person in my workplace,” he says, “but learning as well to become a better person.” 

With his varied experience, and a leadership role at one of the world’s leading tech firms, Tomasz could be forgiven for resting on his laurels. Instead, he spends most Saturdays experimenting on his home computer and learning new things. 

Experimentation is key, he says, especially in the era of modern AI, where everything moves so fast. It’s not all that different to what he did as a kid, in front of the business PC his parents had gifted him. 

“I like to use technology to change this world to be a better place,” says Tomasz, with all the energy of a teenager. “And new things are popping up all the time, so you can never abort.” 

Dr Tomasz Bednarz is the recipient of the 2026 ACU Alumni Award for Innovation and Industry Excellence. He completed a Graduate Certificate in Business Administration (Executive) at ACU in 2018.