Tom O’Rourke is a member of the US National Academy of Engineering, Distinguished Member of ASCE, International Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering, Member of the Mexican Academy of Engineering, and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He received a number of distinctions for his research and teaching, including the Stephen D. Bechtel Pipeline Engineering and Ralph B. Peck Awards from ASCE and gave the 2009 Rankine and 2016 Terzaghi Lectures. He served as President of the Earthquake Engineering Research Institute (EERI) and as the chair or member of many professional society committees. He received the George W. Housner Medal from EERI in 2016.

Tom has authored or co-authored over 390 technical publications. His research interests cover geotechnical engineering, earthquake engineering, underground construction technologies, engineering for large, geographically distributed systems, and geographic information technologies and database management. He served as an advisor on more than 120 projects in 13 different countries, and testified before the U.S. House of Representatives Science Committee on numerous occasions.  He served on government advisory boards, as well as the consulting boards or peer reviews for many projects associated with highway, rapid transit, water supply, and energy distribution systems.