Thomas Webster

Professor, Environmental Health

  • Title Professor, Environmental Health
  • Office Talbot T443W
  • Phone 617.358.2458
Tom Webster has several main research areas: 1) exposure routes and health hazards of chemicals used in consumer products, especially flame retardants, plasticizers and emerging compounds, as well as perfluoralkyl compounds (PFCs) that are also found in water; 2) health impacts of exposure to mixtures of chemicals, with applications in toxicology and epidemiology; 3) endocrine disruption; 4) methodological aspects of environmental epidemiology, particularly causal inference, ecologic bias, the use of combinations of individual and group level data, and disease mapping and clusters. Like the rest of my department, I am very interested in the community context of environmental health. Dr. Webster served on the National Research Council’s Subcommittee on Fluoride in Drinking Water and the Institute of Medicine’s Committee on Making Best Use of the Agent Orange Exposure Reconstruction Model. The work of Dr. Webster and his colleagues and students has been featured in Environmental Health Perspectives (“PFCs and Cholesterol: A Sticky Connection,” “Unwelcome Guest: PBDEs in Indoor Dust”), Bostonia Magazine (“Trouble at Home,” “You Are What You Eat, Including Your Sofa”), Discovery News (“Handwashing Cuts Flame Retardant Exposure”) and the National Public Radio show “Living on Earth,” among other places.

Expertise: Risk & exposure of consumer products, disease mapping

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