Harvard Catalyst Profiles

Theodore (Ted) K. Courtney is Instructor in Injury, Safety, and Ergonomics in the Department of Environmental Health at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and the Harvard Education and Research Center for Occupational Safety and Health in the Environmental and Occupational Medicine and Epidemiology program in the Department. He has taught at the Harvard Chan School since 1995. Ted is also Technical Director, Casualty at The Hanover Insurance Group and President of TKC Consulting LLC.

Ted previously was Vice President for Product Strategy at Concorde Health, Inc. a workplace safety, injury prevention and return to work focused start-up from 2019-2022. From 2018-2019, he was the Executive Director of the Football Players Health Study at Harvard University where he was responsible for administrative leadership of the FPHS research program funded by the NFL Players Association. From 2017 to 2018 Ted held a research appointment at MIT working with MIT Senseable City Lab and MIT Age Lab.

Prior to 2018, Ted was the Director of the Center for Injury Epidemiology (CIE) and Director for Institutional Engagement at the Liberty Mutual Research Institute for Safety, Hopkinton, Massachusetts. From 1993 until the Institute's closure in 2017, he and his colleagues investigated injury characteristics, distributions and determinants; conducted original descriptive and analytic epidemiologic studies in populations exposed at work, at home, in the community and on the road; and identified and developed new design and analysis methodologies, collaborating closely with Institute colleagues in psychology, physiology, engineering, health services research, and disability management.

Ted has research interests in epidemiology of injury, occupational injury, sports injury, surveillance, slips, trips, and falls, fatigue, and ergonomics. He presently has over 100 published works including more than 90 peer-reviewed journal articles and a book. His published works include developments in epidemiologic methods, injury morbidity/mortality studies of U.S. and international worker populations including professional athletes, and slips, trips and falls. His work has appeared in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, JAMA Internal Medicine, Occupational and Environmental Medicine, Scandinavian Journal of Work, Environment and Health, American Journal of Industrial Medicine, Ergonomics, Journal of General Internal Medicine, PLoS One, Preventive Medicine Reports, the Orthopaedic Journal of Sports Medicine, and Accident Analysis and Prevention, among others.

He received the 2014 Excellence in Science Award from the American Public Health Association, Injury Control and Emergency Health Services Section. He previously received the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Occupational Research Agenda Partnering Award for Worker Health and Safety for his work with colleagues on a multi-institutional, multi-national research project on slips and falls among health care workers in 2006. The Ergonomics Society presented him with the William F. Floyd Award in 2003 for his work with colleagues in advancing slips and falls research methods. He is also a recipient of the 2009 Best Paper award in Ergonomics for a multi-year intervention trial for the prevention of slips, trips and falls in hospital workers. From 2015 to 2019, Ted also served on the Board of Scientific Counselors of the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

A Board Certified Safety Professional in comprehensive practice and ergonomics, Ted has also previously served as Associate Editor at Accident Analysis and Prevention and on the Editorial Boards of the Journal of Occupational and Environmental Hygiene, Professional Safety, and Injury Epidemiology. He is a member of the American Public Health Association, the American Society of Safety Professionals, the American Industrial Hygiene Association, the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society, and the System Safety Society. Ted received his B.S. in applied experimental psychology (human factors) from the Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, and his M.S. in industrial and operations engineering from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.