Thomas Gassert

Dr. Gassert is board certified in both Preventive Occupational Medicine and Internal Medicine, and was an Industrial (Occupational) Hygienist, educator, author, journalist and factory worker prior to his medical training. He was previously an Instructor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School. He has been an Instructor and a Visiting Scientist at the Environmental & Occupational Medicine & Epidemiology program at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health since 1997. He is an Assistant Professor of Medicine at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, Adjunct Assistant Professor of Medicine and Family Medicine at Boston University School of Medicine and at Dartmouth College Geisel School of Medicine. He served three years as President of the New England College of Occupational and Environmental Medicine (NECOEM), a component of the American College of Occupational and Environmental Medicine (ACOEM) where he is a Fellow. His first interest is education about and clinical practice in occupational and environmental health (OEH).

Dr. Gassert’s experience has included management of worker compensation injuries and illnesses, medical surveillance programs, disability case management, work-site investigations, medical-legal case investigations, and expert witness representation in legal cases. His patients and clients over the years have included heavy and light manufacturing industries, high tech, aerospace, biomedical R&D, pharmaceuticals, service industries, hospitals and nursing homes, schools, public employees, the Defense Department, and the University of Massachusetts Medical Center and Medical School biological research laboratories. He has served on three Institutional Biosafety Committees in public and private research institutions, including the University of Massachusetts Medical School, Novartis Institutes for Biomedical Research, and Novartis Vaccines & Diagnostics. Medical surveillance work has included firefighters in Massachusetts and New Hampshire, environmental protection workers in Maine, and pharmaceutical research scientists. He consulted on construction work illness and hazard exposures on the Central Artery / Tunnel Project “Big Dig” in Boston for several years. In the 1980s, he authored a book on health hazards in electronics manufacturing while working in Asia as a founder and director of a regional non-governmental organization, and has published on the long-term outcomes of occupational asthma and on toxicological aspects of the gassing incident at Bhopal, India, the world’s worst industrial disaster. In September 2005, he assisted CNN with filming on environmental health issues in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. In his former capacity as Chief Medical Officer for an OEH company for six years, he was responsible for directing and overseeing medical services at client companies primarily in the biotechnology sector in North America.

Dr. Gassert received a master’s degree in occupational (industrial) hygiene from the University of London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine and a medical degree from the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey (now Rutgers University) – New Jersey Medical School. He completed residencies and fellowships in Internal Medicine at Johns Hopkins University and in Occupational & Environmental Medicine at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health (HSPH) where he served also as chief resident and still teaches in the OEH MPH program and in an Industrial Hygiene continuing education program. He has served on the HSPH Occupational Medicine Residency Advisory Committee since 2005. He is a faculty member of the ACOEM Foundations of Occupational Medicine course. Dr. Gassert is currently an OEH specialist on staff with several New England hospitals, including Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center, the Elliot Hospital Manchester NH, Southern New Hampshire Medical Center Nashua NH, Boston Medical Center, University of Massachusetts Marlborough Hospital Marlborough MA, and continues to teach at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Boston, including in 2017 a distance Environmental Epidemiology course in Saudi Arabia.

In the Asia-Pacific and Africa regions, Dr. Gassert has consulted and worked with labor and non-governmental organizations (NGO) and has presented at OE Health and Hygiene conferences. He co-founded in 1980 the Asia Monitor Resource Centre, an NGO based in Hong Kong, and is a member of the international board of advisors of the Asian Network for the Rights of Occupational & Environmental Victims (ANROEV), an NGO based in Dhaka, Bangladesh. He has helped to train professionals in occupational and environmental medicine from around the Asia region at venues in Thailand, China, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Vietnam, Mongolia, India, S. Korea, Saudi Arabia and Bangladesh through his affiliations with Harvard, ANROEV and the Asian Network for Occupational Hygiene. His recent interests have included editorial work pro bono for Hesperian Health Guides, support for miner pneumoconiosis compensation in South Africa, and efforts to support reversal of manmade global warming and OEH professional development. In 2017, he served as a consultant faculty member for a new U.N. World Health Organization OEH initiative in Fiji, South Pacific. His interest in worker health began when he was a factory worker as a young man. He is blessed with three grown children who are emerging experts in pure mathematics, global water and climate environmental data impact for policy, and urban farming.