Thomas F. Mulligan, 1933-2023

I first came to know Dr. Tom Mulligan in the spring of 1968, when he presented a paper for membership in the Southwest Angle Society of Orthodontists. His presentation was a tour de force that flummoxed and bewildered the audience of Angle members, plus faculty and residents of the Baylor University Orthodontic Department. Hardly anyone in attendance knew anything about Burstone biomechanics, but Tom deftly explained how such topics as cantilevers, force-created moments, moment-­to-force ratios, off-center bends, center bends, static equilibrium, and Newtonian physics applied to orthodontic therapies.

Afterward, I approached Tom and asked if he would mind mentoring me in biomechanics, and he eagerly accepted the challenge—which perplexed and bemused him over several decades, as he contended with my congenital confusion and misunderstanding. But Tom never tired of helping me, and for that I am eternally grateful.

Tom’s sense of humor was remarkable, and it stayed with him until the very end. When someone would ask him his age, he would reply, “I am 89, and I should be 91, but I was sick for two years.”

Tom was born in Grand Forks, North Dakota, the third of 10 children. He attended Saint John’s University in Minnesota and left in 1953 to serve in the U.S. Army until 1955. He then attended Phoenix College, where he met Maria Teresa de Boas from Caracas, Venezuela, whom he married in 1957 at the end of his first year in the Marquette University School of Dentistry. Upon graduating from Marquette, he enrolled in Indiana University, where he graduated with an MSD in orthodontics. He then opened a practice in Phoenix and treated patients for 55 years.