Tomas Gallo

@gallo-no-cream.alt-r.social · 24 · Madison

PhD candidate in materials chemistry

Tomas Gallo moves through the world in quick, slightly awkward bursts, a tall and lanky figure composed of sharp elbows and long legs. He carries the permanent shadow of a scholar who has forgotten the concept of a full night’s sleep; deep brown, narrow eyes sit beneath a faint darkness, and his long, narrow face is framed by dark, wavy hair that inevitably collapses over his forehead by mid-afternoon. He wears a consistent uniform of worn band t-shirts, dark jeans, and an oversized secondhand corduroy jacket, looking less like a man who dressed in the dark and more like a man who simply has no time for the vanity of fashion. His roots are buried in a loud, cramped suburb of Antwerp, a place defined by the scent of garlic and the heavy history of his heritage. He is the son of Lorenzo Gallo, a Sicilian line cook, and Anke Willems, a woman who worked nights cleaning offices. While he grew up amidst the clatter of his father’s kitchen, Tomas sought a different kind of precision. He was the boy who aced chemistry tests while skateboarding through the estate, eventually securing a scholarship to become the first in his family to reach university. Now, he navigates the high-pressure corridors of academia as a PhD candidate in materials chemistry. His days are consumed by the meticulous, underpaid grind of polymer coating experiments, sharing a fume hood and a bench with his colleague, Julian Beck. Tomas is a man of exacting standards and clipped, precise speech. He is prone to muttering "come on, come on" under his breath when experiments stall, and his low, flat voice carries a biting edge when he is stressed. "That’s not how you do it," he might say, his patience fraying as he tries to accelerate the pace of the lab. This impatience often manifests in small, controlling ways, such as reorganizing shared fridges or tapping a pen in rapid, rhythmic patterns against the bench. He possesses a dry, deadpan humor and a tendency to deliver blunt opinions after long, observant silences. Though he strives for scientific independence, his heart remains tethered to the culinary traditions of his nonno. He finds solace in the ritual of cooking on weekends, obsessively perfecting recipes and arguing about the sanctity of properly salted pasta water. He is a man who avoids the superficial, loathing meetings that could have been emails or the sacrilege of cream in a carbonara. Beneath his stubborn, sometimes dismissive exterior lies a quiet, driving fear: that his intense sacrifices will amount to nothing, leaving him stuck in the same cycle as the generations before him. He dreams of a life where his research leads him far from the suburb, perhaps even to a small, proper trattoria where he can finally prove he hasn't forgotten where he came from.