Thomas K. Greenfield, PhD
Senior Scientist
- tgreenfield@arg.org 510-898-5853; Cell: 510-326-1555
- External Bios: NCBI Bibliography | Research Gate | Google Scholar | Download CV
EDUCATION
Tom received his BA in Astronomy from Caltech, followed by an SM in Space Science from MIT. Following a major career change, he earned an MA and PhD from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, in Clinical Psychology. Subsequently, after working at Washington State University, he did further postdoctoral training in Clinical Services Research at the UCSF Department of Psychiatry. His three-years’ work at UCSF included training and research experience in statistics, psychometrics, psychiatric epidemiology and survey research, mental health program evaluation, randomized clinical trials and policy analysis.RESEARCH FOCUS
Tom’s long-term interest has been in US and multinational population-level patterns of drinking in the life-course and their self-report and biosensor measurement. Via Center and R01 projects he led research on heavy episodic and high intensity drinking, alcohol-related mortality (two R01s), and assessment of risk for alcohol-related consequences as well as alcohol use disorder. Among the consequences Tom has investigated are alcohol’s harms to others, and their effects on health and wellbeing, for which he has been contact M-PI on both US-based and multinational collaborative R01 projects. Other research themes have included alcohol policy analyses and trends in public opinions, and factors affecting health conditions of Americans. From the early 90s to the present, he has also been engaged in evaluations of both mandated and experimentally tested alcoholic beverage container warning labels, recently including cancer messaging. A validated multidimensional service satisfaction scale he co-developed has been included in a multisite study of prostate cancer survivors, leading to numerous widely cited publications. Tom’s work has included use of retrospective life-course as well as prospective longitudinal data for quantitative studies, but he has also generated and used daily event-level series to better understand drinking behaviors, plus qualitative analyses to examine how people respond to survey questions and to investigate the alcohol policy formation process at the Federal level.
Tom Greenfield is a senior scientist at the Alcohol Research Group with over 40 years of experience in public health research and influences on health behaviors. Previously, he directed ARG’s National Alcohol Research Center (1999-2015) and was the ARG Scientific Director from 2008 to 2023. Before joining ARG, he was Coordinator of Research and a Clinical Psychologist at Washington State University and Research Director at the Marin Institute for the Prevention of Alcohol and Other Drug Problems. Over the years, he has been a consultant to numerous organizations and universities on alcohol guidelines and other substance use and mental health topics, as well as serving on dissertation committees and mentoring numerous pre- and post-doctoral fellows. He is a Field Editor at Alcohol, Clinical & Experimental Research and has served on the Editorial Advisory Board for several other journals, and on the Extramural Advisory Board for NIAAA. With over 275 peer-reviewed publications and numerous chapters and commentaries, in 2016 he received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the ATOD Section of the American Public Health Association; in 2019 was co-winner of the Jellinek Memorial Award for Alcohol Epidemiology.
IN THE NEWS
See All NewsTom Greenfield discusses restrictive state alcohol control laws for Newsweek. Learn more
