Tom Luben

Tom Luben, PhD, MSPH is a Senior Research Scientist at the University of Michigan School of Public Health and an Adjunct Professor in the Department of Epidemiology at the Gillings School of Global Public Health at UNC-Chapel Hill. He previously served as Senior Epidemiologist at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency from May 2007 to October 2025. Dr. Luben conducts and publishes policy-relevant epidemiologic studies, focusing on the health effects of exposure to air and water pollution, including particulate matter and ozone. Recently, he has worked to gain an understanding of the association between exposure to environmental (including the built environment) and climatic conditions (both individually and as cumulative impacts) and health outcomes across the life course, including various adverse birth outcomes (such as birth defects and preterm birth) and fetal and infant mortality and measure of cognitive aging, and Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias. He holds an MSPH degree from Tulane University’s School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine, and a PhD in Environmental Health from Colorado State University.

Dr. Luben’s fellowship project will examine how historical redlining continues to shape present-day exposure to extreme temperatures and related health risks. The project will link Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC) redlining maps for more than 200 U.S. cities with daily extreme heat and cold metrics from 2000–2025 to assess whether neighborhoods historically graded as “hazardous” or “declining” experience systematically worse temperature extremes than higher-graded areas. The project will generate a publicly available time-series dataset of HOLC polygon-specific extreme temperature metrics that can be linked with spatially resolved health data. It will also demonstrate how spatial misalignment between historical HOLC boundaries and modern geographic units, such as census tracts or ZIP codes, can contribute to exposure misclassification and bias in epidemiologic studies when precise residential addresses are unavailable. Finally, the project will extend the analysis to health outcomes by linking HOLC redlining maps and extreme temperature data with Health and Retirement Study residential histories and cognitive measures. This work will evaluate whether residence in historically redlined neighborhoods is associated with poorer cognitive aging outcomes, including Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias, and whether extreme temperature exposures contribute to differential vulnerability.