Thomas Okon, a Senior Technical Consultant in the field of travel automation software, earned his B.S. in Computer Science from the University of North Texas in 2007. He is the grandson of LED inventor James R. Biard. In 2015, Thomas co-authored a paper with his grandfather about the development of LEDs at Texas Instruments in the 1960s. For the last year he has been mentored in the fields of physics and engineering by Jerry D. Merryman, the inventor of the first digital, handheld calculator.