Thomas Quirk trained as a nuclear physicist at the University of Melbourne, has attended the Harvard Business School, and has been a Fellow of three Oxford Colleges.

Quirk is a corporate director of biotech companies and former board member of the Institute of Public Affairs for which he has written numerous articles and papers and provided comments to the media. Quirk joined the board of therapeutics company Sementis in 2011 as a non-executive director. He is an occasional speaker on the topic of innovation in Australia and has written extensively on subjects of energy policy and climate change.

Quirk has worked for resources company, CRA (now known as Rio Tinto). He has also worked in the United States at Fermilab, the universities of Chicago and Harvard and at CERN in Europe. He was an early director of Biota, a company which developed an influenza drug. He has held several positions in utilities, electricity and transport industries including a founding directorship of the Victorian Power Exchange. He was Deputy Chairman of VENCorp, which managed the transmission and wholesale natural gas market and system planning for the electricity market in Victoria, Australia. He is also a former Chairman of VicTrack, the owner of the state's railway assets and also worked for James D. Wolfensohn in a venture capital fund based in New York City. Quirk was appointed as a Fellow of the Heide Museum of Modern Art in Victoria, of which he is a benefactor.

Quirk is an advocate for the expansion of Australia's role in the nuclear fuel chain and has expressed support for the development of uranium enrichment capacity, spent fuel reprocessing and future storage of nuclear waste in Australia. Quirk contributed a chapter entitled Opportunities in the nuclear fuel cycle to the 2011 policy perspective publication Australia's nuclear options for the Committee for Economic Development of Australia (CEDA).

Between 2006 and 2011, Quirk wrote numerous articles for the website Online Opinion, including criticisms of wind power and renewable energy and pieces promoting nuclear power. Quirk is also a regular writer for Quadrant online. Quirk co-signed a letter to the UN Secretary General rejecting the scientific consensus on climate change.