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Meet Dr. Tom English, a pioneer and advocate in the fight against climate change, and the first Architect featured on the Fairness4Marketplace. With a lifetime dedicated to environmental education and action, Tom English is a trailblazer in environmental restoration and policy, renowned for his leadership in reducing air pollution and managing nuclear waste. 

After getting his PhD, he researched computer memories for IBM. This led him to building and managing a 100 person Microelectronics Lab for General Dynamics. He became President of the Dallas-Fort Worth Microelectronics Society. Receiving a “Top Level Management” Award from the President of General Dynamics for leading the F-111 fighter recovery program after the wings continued to fall off the aircraft. By this time he had offices in Fort Worth, Washington and Cocoa Beach, and had a body-guard since he was considered “a precious national asset.”

His “First Earth Day” experience in 1971 led him to “throw his successful career away” and become a student getting his Post Doc in Environmental Management.    After this educational sabbatical, Tom’s new adventures began when he joined the US Environmental Protection Agency. At the U.S. EPA, Tom directed an epidemiological study of 40,000 people to determine the health effects of air pollutants. 

Then he became an assistant to the Director of the EPA National Environmental Research Center, who directed over 1,500 employees. In this capacity he served as:

• Technical Director of the world’s first Regional Air Pollution Study,
• Directed a $1/2 billion per year Energy & Environment Program.
• Coordinated a project to withhold highway transportation funds from the State of California until they agreed to produce an acceptable air quality implementation plan. 

When he moved to California, he continued his adventure by becoming the architect of the California Clean Air Act, Dr. English spearheaded efforts that significantly reduced smog, dramatically improved air quality, and saved billions of dollars in the process. His work in this landmark legislation set a global standard for air pollution control and environmental accountability.

While at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory he organized a Nuclear Waste Management Team, of people from Caltech, JPL, and Scripps Institution of Oceanography. Dr. English’s group managed high-level programs for President Carter's Office of Science and Technology Policy, the government of Sweden, NASA, and the California Energy Commission. He applied his critical expertise to nuclear waste issues at San Onofre, .and   provided the impetus for the formation of Congressman Levin’s Nuclear Waste Task Force.

Tom ran a network of about 2 dozen air quality monitoring stations as part of the Community Health Environmental Surveillance Studies (CHESS) program. The CHESS program was designed to support the US effort to set National Ambient Air Quality Standards to protect the health of Americans. The stations were located in 5 major areas across the country in New York / New Jersey, California, Utah, and Tennessee. In each of these areas 3 to 7 socio-economically comparable localities were chosen to monitor for air pollutants such as ozone, suspended particulates, sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides.

In this lecture video below, Dr. English shares his insights into creating lasting solutions for the climate crisis, emphasizing the importance of supporting changemakers like himself. Without architects like Tom, true, enduring progress would not be possible. Watch and be inspired to help fund, build, and sustain transformative analytical efforts on the Fairness4Marketplace.