Geoffrey Kabat earned a Ph.D. in Russian and Comparative Literature from Columbia University. He then switched to public health and epidemiology, obtaining an M.S. and ABD from the Columbia School of Public Health in 1984. He has done primary research in cancer epidemiology at the American Health Foundation, Stony Brook University School of Medicine, and the Albert Einstein College of Medicine. He has published 155 peer-reviewed scientific papers on topics ranging from smoking and diet to pesticides, air pollution, electromagnetic fields, sleep, and clinical factors, including obesity, height, and blood type.

In the 1990s, he became aware that often the message conveyed to the public about research on environmental exposures was badly skewed and that, in the words of an air pollution researcher in California, “it is in our interest to have people be afraid.” This led him to adopt a dual perspective on epidemiologic research. In the early 2000s, he started writing articles attempting to clarify various purported health risks, including electromagnetic fields, cell phones, pesticides, bisphenol-A, radon, passive smoking, and “endocrine disruption” in Forbes, Slate, the Genetic Literacy Project, Quillette, and elsewhere. He has published two books regarding health risks: Hyping Health Risks: Environmental Hazards in Daily Life and the Science of Epidemiology (2008) and Getting Risk Right: Understanding the Science of Elusive Health Risks (2016).