Expertise
Worker Health and Safety Education and Policy; Social Movements; Environmental Justice; Labor and Environmentalism; Climate Change and Worker Health; Political Economy of Public Health.
Research Interests
Worker health and safety education; environmental and occupational health policy; labor and environmentalism; environmental justice; sustainable production; political economy of development; urban and industrial development processes; globalization and its impact on environmental and worker health.
Education
Ph.D., Geography, Clark University, 1996
M.A., Geography, Arizona State University, 1982
B.S., Geography and Environmental Science, Pennsylvania State University, 1979
Biosketch
Thomas Estabrook, Ph.D. became Project Director of The New England Consortium in January 2018, after serving as a health and safety trainer on the project since 1996. He is also an adjunct professor in the Department of Public Health at UMass Lowell, where he has regularly taught a public health course to undergraduates since 2005. Tom is an academically trained geographer. As a health and safety trainer, Tom taught a full range of courses for TNEC, as well as deliver specialized trainings in chemicals policy and clean production. He applies popular education/worker empowerment techniques at every opportunity. Prior to his work with TNEC, Tom worked as a community organizer with the Oil, Chemical & Atomic Workers union in Louisiana and with the Massachusetts Toxics Campaign in Boston, where he organized community groups around pollution, public health, and worker health issues. His interest in worker health and safety grew out of earlier work experiences as a construction laborer and as a line worker in a machine production facility. Tom serves on the governing board of the Alliance for a Healthy Tomorrow, a coalition of public health, environmental, community and labor organizations based in Boston, and on the advisory board for the Occupational Health Surveillance Program of the Massachusetts Department of Public Health. He is an active leader in his union, the Massachusetts Teachers Association.