Tom Webster has several main research areas: 1) exposure routes and health hazards of chemicals used in consumer products, especially polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PBDEs), other flame retardants, and perfluoralkyl compounds (PFCs); 2) interactions of chemicals (with applications in toxicology and epidemiology); 3) endocrine disruption; 4) methodological aspects of environmental epidemiology, particularly issues in spatial epidemiology such as disease mapping and clusters, ecologic bias, and the use of combinations of individual and group level data. Like the rest of my department, I am very interested in the community context of environmental health.
Dr. Webster is an investigator in Boston University’s Superfund Basic Research Program. He 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.
To learn more about Dr. Webster’s research and publications (including reprints of many), visit his website at the BU’s Center for Interdisciplinary Research in Environmental Exposures and Health (CIREEH).
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") and the National Public Radio show "Living on Earth." For other news, look here.
