Seth has been part of the Interdisciplinary and Global Studies Division since 2002, as teacher, advisor, and co-director of project centers. He is the co-Director of the Boston Project Center and was the co-Director of the Bangkok Project Center from 2011-2018. He enjoys exposing students to contemporary problems in environmental and public health policy making and challenging them to apply insights emerging from research to practical applications. He loves share his curiosity with students about the ways that people are impacted by different technological and natural systems.
A desire to link research and practice has been a central part of Seth’s work since receiving his PhD in Environmental Science and Policy from Clark University in 1996. Seth’s research interests have been concerned with risk governance, public participation, longterm stewardship of contaminated sites, and developing tools to characterize human impacts and vulnerabilities to risk events. He has conducted research, largely with colleagues at the Social and Environmental Research Institute, in a wide range of policy arenas, most recently focused on climate change adaptation planning, clean-up of sites in the US nuclear weapons complex, and nuclear waste management. A thread throughout his work has been to empower communities to participate more effectively in the management of risk.
Seth was a member of federal Advisory Committee on Energy-Related Epidemiologic Research that provided advice to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on health studies arising from programs of the US nuclear weapons complex and chaired its Subcommittee for Community Affairs for 2 years. The role of this subcommittee was to bring voices of community residents into deliberations about health study designs and public health responses to contamination from nuclear weapons facilities. He also served on the National Academies of Science Committee on Transportation of Spent Nuclear Fuel and High Level Radioactive Waste, Standing Committee on Chemical Demilitarization, and Committee on Alternatives for the Demilitarization of Conventional Munitions.
Research Interests
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Media Coverage
WPI’s effort to help Worcester determine the city’s hottest areas was detailed in thisTelegram & Gazette article. “Excessive heat is a public health threat, especially to people we’d describe as vulnerable,” said Associate Professor, IGSD, Seth Tuler, who is working on the project. He also noted that he hoped the project would provide “a more fine-grained understanding” of how that health threat is distributed across Worcester. WPI’s Global Lab was a project funder, the article added.