Thomas Estabrook

Thomas Estabrook, Ph.D.

Project Director / Co-Principal Investigator

Expertise

Thomas EstabrookWorker Health and Safety Education and Policy; Environmental Justice; Labor and Environmentalism; Climate Change and Worker Health; Political Economy of Public Health.

Education

  • Ph.D., Geography, Clark University
  • M.A., Geography, Arizona State University
  • B.S., Geography and Environmental Science, Pennsylvania State University

Biosketch

Thomas Estabrook, Ph.D. became Project Director of The New England Consortium in January 2018, after serving as a health and safety trainer and special projects manager on the project since 1996. He is also an adjunct professor in the Department of Public Health at UMass Lowell, where he has taught public health and environmental health since 2005. Tom is an academically trained geographer. As a health and safety trainer, Tom taught a full range of courses for TNEC, including specialized trainings in chemicals policy and cleaner 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 steering committee 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.