Rate My Professor THOMAS CLASEN

Thomas Clasen, an epidemiologist, serves as the Rose Salamone Gangarosa Professor of Environmental Health in the Gangarosa Department of Environmental Health at Emory University’s Rollins School of Public Health, with joint appointments in the Hubert Department of Global Health and Epidemiology. He holds a Juris Doctorate from Georgetown University Law Center (1981), a Master of Science in Control of Infectious Diseases (2002), and a PhD in Environmental Epidemiology (2006) from the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine (LSHTM). After two decades practicing international corporate law as a partner at Foley & Lardner, he joined LSHTM faculty in 2004, advancing to Professor of Water, Sanitation and Health. In 2013, he was appointed to his current endowed chair at Emory. In 2025, Prof. Clasen became Dean's Distinguished Scholar at the University of California, Berkeley School of Public Health.

Prof. Clasen has directed research exceeding $45 million on household- and community-level environmental health interventions in low-income countries, authoring more than 270 peer-reviewed articles in journals including the New England Journal of Medicine, The Lancet, The BMJ, PLOS Medicine, and Environmental Health Perspectives. Key publications include “Burden of disease from inadequate water, sanitation and hygiene in low‐and middle‐income settings: a retrospective analysis of data from 145 countries” (Tropical Medicine & International Health, 2014), “Interventions to improve water quality for preventing diarrhoea: systematic review and meta-analysis” (BMJ, 2007), and “Effectiveness of a rural sanitation programme on diarrhoea, soil-transmitted helminth infection, and child malnutrition in Odisha, India: a cluster-randomised trial” (The Lancet Global Health, 2014). His research encompasses randomized controlled trials such as the multi-country Household Air Pollution Intervention Network (HAPIN) assessing liquefied petroleum gas stoves and fuel, the Revitalizing Informal Settlements and their Environments (RISE) study testing biological wastewater treatment in urban slums in Indonesia and Fiji, and the Climate Resilient Odisha Produce Study (CROPS) improving dietary diversity through greywater-irrigated homestead gardens. He serves as a member of the WHO Technical Advisory Group for the Health and Energy Plan of Action and the WHO Scientific Advisory Group on Global Air Pollution and Health, and advised the World Health Organization on its Guidelines on Sanitation and Health.