Tom Koch

Tom Koch is an Adjunct Professor of Geography at the University of British Columbia's Department of Geography within the Faculty of Arts. With a multidisciplinary PhD spanning geography, ethics/philosophy, and medicine, he maintains an active research profile across medical geography, disease mapping, and bioethics. His work bridges historical and contemporary approaches to understanding epidemics spatially through mapping, while also addressing pressing ethical questions in healthcare, particularly around assisted dying and pandemic response.

Dr. Koch's research interests span three interconnected domains: medical geography and disease mapping, medical ethics and bioethics, and journalism. His pioneering work in medical geography has generated influential books including Disease Maps: Epidemics on the Ground and Cartographies of Disease, exploring how spatial representation shapes our understanding of disease. In bioethics, he has published extensively on euthanasia, organ transplantation policy, and more recently, Canada's Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD) legislation, with over 50 papers and books including Ethics in Everyday Places: Mapping Moral Stress, Distress, and Injury. His journalism background informs his public engagement, having conducted over 203 media interviews on the Covid-19 pandemic since January 2020.

Analysis of his recent scholarly output reveals a clear trajectory connecting geography, ethics, and pandemic response. His publications demonstrate how spatial thinking informs ethical decision-making during health crises, with particular attention to how mapping technologies have transformed from woodblock prints to Web 3.0 platforms. This interdisciplinary approach reveals how disease mapping serves not just as a technical tool but as a framework for understanding moral dimensions of public health crises, particularly visible in his Covid-19 related work examining both spatial-temporal data democratization and the ethical failures of pandemic response.

As an active public intellectual, Dr. Koch has engaged extensively with media and policy discussions, particularly regarding Canada's MAiD legislation and pandemic response. His background as both a journalist and researcher enables him to bridge academic scholarship with public discourse, making complex ethical and geographical concepts accessible to broader audiences while maintaining scholarly rigor.