Thomas R. Cole

Thomas R. Cole is the McGovern Chair and Director of the McGovern Center for Humanities and Ethics at University of Texas Health Science Center in Houston. His work has been featured in the New York Times, NPR, and PBS. Cole has served as an adviser to the President's Council on Bioethics and the United Nations NGO Committee on Ageing. His book The Journey of Life: A Cultural History of Aging in America was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. He is senior editor of The Oxford Book of Aging, which the New Yorker cited as one of the most memorable books of the year. Cole's book No Color Is My Kind: the Life of Eldrewey Stearns and the Desegregation of Houston was adapted into the film, The Strange Demise of Jim Crow, which was broadcast nationally on over sixty PBS stations. In 2007, he coproduced Stroke: Conversations and Explanations, a prize-winning film about the invisible world of stroke survivors.