Tom Hennessy

Director of the Arctic Investigations Program, a field station for the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Anchorage, Alaska.

Dr. Hennessy is trained in both Family and Preventive Medicine and has a Master’s in Public Health from Emory University.  He is a career officer in the US Public Health Service.  Tom worked on the Navajo Indian Reservation from 1990-94 as a family doctor and was involved in the early detection and response to the Hantavirus pulmonary syndrome outbreak in 1993.   He joined CDC through the Epidemic Intelligence Service (EIS) program, where he worked on foodborne disease outbreaks and led the investigation of the largest salmonellosis outbreak in U.S. history.   Since 1998, he has worked to reduce infectious diseases among the peoples of the Arctic and Subarctic through disease surveillance, research, and domestic and international partnerships.  He was part of the Ebola outbreak response in West Africa in 2014-15 and led an investigation of risk factors for Ebola transmission within households in Sierra Leone. 

His interests include vaccine preventable diseases, food and waterborne infections, zoonotic infectious diseases and reducing health disparities.  Tom is an affiliate faculty member of the University of Alaska, Anchorage in the Department of Health Sciences.  He is also the Co-chair for the Arctic Human Health Experts Group, a multinational advisory group to the Arctic Council.