Meet Tom

Tom O’Donnell grew up with his 13 siblings in an Iowa town of around a thousand people. His father was a carpenter, and his mother was a homemaker and postal clerk. Tom pumped gas, set hotel meeting rooms and did other jobs to pay his way through Iowa State University, with help from federal grants. He started working for newspapers at 17 and spent more than 20 years as an Iowa reporter and editor, including almost 16 years with the Des Moines Register covering diverse subjects, including higher education, crime, courts, business and research. Tom next focused on science, first as a freelancer focused on plant biology, and then 16 years at a nonprofit company where he wrote about supercomputing applications, physics and nuclear science.

Tom and his wife, Paula Mohr, live in her childhood home in rural Keosauqua. He serves on the Bentonsport Improvement Association board and helped Van Buren County Conservation win a $1.6 million grant to rehabilitate the historic Bentonsport Pedestrian Bridge over the Des Moines River.

Tom is a board member for the Rural Restoration Project, a non-profit that seeks to build economic and social opportunities in the 5 counties of Iowa Senate District 44. He is the secretary of Science Iowa, a nonprofit that promotes science in the public interest, publicly supported research and evidence-based policy.