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 Bangkok Project Center and co-Director of the Boston Project Center, where 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.

The desire to link research and practice has been 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, including climate change adaptation planning, marine fisheries management, clean-up of sites in the US nuclear weapons complex, nuclear waste management, and marine oil spill response. A thread throughout his work has been to empower communities to participate more effectively in the management of risk. Because of his work with communities, he was asked to advise the National Cancer Institute in its efforts to inform people about health risks from iodine-131 nuclear weapons testing fallout. He was a member of federal Advisory Committee on Energy-Related Epidemiologic Research 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, and was recently appointed to the National Academies of Science Standing Committee on Chemical Demilitarization which advises the US Army on the destruction of the remaining US chemical weapons stockpile.

In an effort to balance his life he practices yoga (and trained as a yoga teacher), loves to travel, explores ways to pickle fruit, and continues his effort to play the guitar.