Center Fellows
W. Andrew Achenbaum, PhD
W. Andrew Achenbaum is a professor of social work and history at the University of Houston, where he has worked since 1999. A graduate of Amherst College, the universities of Pennsylvania and Michigan, he has taught at Canisius College, Carnegie Mellon University, and for most of his career as a professor of history at the University of Michigan and deputy director of its Institute of Gerontology. Achenbaum is the author of 4 books, co-editor of a dozen more, and a frequent contributor to academic and popular media; Johns Hopkins University Press will publish his OLDER AMERICANS, VITAL COMMUNITIES: A BOLD VISION OF SOCIETAL AGING later this year. A past board chair of the National Council on the Aging, he is a recent recipient of its Geneva Mathiasen Award. Achenbaum heads the Gerson David Consortium of Productive Aging at the University of Houston, which focuses on vital aging, spirituality, and global aging.
James Giordano, PhD
James Giordano, Ph.D., Fellow, Bioethics and Medical Philosophy. Dr. Giordano is Director of the Institute for Integrative Medicine Research, Ethics and Policy, and Professor of Integrative Medicine and Pathology at the Moody Health Center, Pasadena, TX. As well, he is a Hunt-Travis Visiting Scholar at the Center for Clinical Bioethics, Georgetown University. Dr. Giordano's work focuses upon neuroethics, virtue-ethics and the core philosophic basis of medicine relevant to the phenomenology and hermeneutics of pain and the clinical encounter as applicable in both mainstream and complementary/integrative therapeutics. Dr. Giordano is a fellow of the American Academy of Pain Management and the recipient of the 2004 AAPM Richard Weiner Award in Pain Education. The author of more than 50 peer-reviewed publications in neuroscience, pathology, bioethics and public health, he is the bioethics' section editor of the American Journal of Pain Management, neuroscience section editor of the Pain Physician Journal and editor of the forthcoming books Maldynia: Multi-disciplinary Approaches to the Illness of Chronic Pain (Taylor & Francis) and Integrative Approaches to Chronic Pain (Jones & Bartlett).
John Lienhard, PhD
John Lienhard is an emeritus professor of mechanical engineering, with a courtesy appointment in history, at the University of Houston. He taught at the college level between 1952 and 2000, with a specialty in thermal systems. Presently Dr. Lienhard works full-time as author and host of the daily program, The Engines of Our Ingenuity, produced by KUHF and heard nationally on public radio where upwards of 200 of his radio episodes deal with, or have relevance to, medicine. He is the author of several books and countless articles in both engineering research and history, and is a member of the National Academy of Engineers. For the better part of a decade he has been one of the developers of the blue book course, Heath Care and the Arts at the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston.
B. Andrew Lustig, PhD
B. Andrew Lustig, Ph.D., holds the recently endowed Holmes Rolston Chair in Religion and Science at Davidson College in Davidson, North Carolina and is a Professor in Davidson's Department of Religious Studies. Before his current position, Dr. Lustig directed the Program on Biotechnology, Religion, and Ethics (PBRE), co-sponsored by Rice University and The Baylor Center for Medical Ethics and Health Policy and oversaw the "Altering Nature" project, a multi-year study of religious perspectives on biotechnology funded by the Ford Foundation. While PBRE Director, Lustig held appointments as Research Scholar in Religious Studies at Rice, Adjunct Professor of Clinical Ethics at M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, and a Visiting Member of the Graduate Faculty at UTMB Galveston. In earlier positions, Dr. Lustig served as Academic Director at the Institute of Religion in the Texas Medical Center, as a Member of the Center for Medical Ethics and Health Policy at Baylor College of Medicine, and as the staff ethicist for Governor Mario Cuomo's New York State Task Force on Life and the Law. Dr. Lustig has taught previously at the University of Massachusetts and at the New School for Social Research in New York. He received his Ph.D. in Religious Ethics from the University of Virginia and also holds advanced degrees in the History of Science from Princeton University and in Theology from the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, California. He has published eight books in medical and public policy ethics, is the author of more than 130 other articles and book chapters, and writes the regular "Ethics Watch" column for Commonweal magazine. Dr. Lustig is a founding co-editor of the journal Christian Bioethics and was the editor of the multi-volume Bioethics Yearbook series for Kluwer Academic Publishers. He has served on numerous advisory and editorial boards, and is currently a member of the editorial board of The Journal of Medicine and Philosophy.
William Monroe, PhD
William Monroe is professor of English and executive associate dean of the Honors College at the University of Houston. His publications include articles on physicians in literature, on the relationship between reading and the practice of medicine, and on the twentieth-century authors Willa Cather, T. S. Eliot, Vladimir Nabokov, and Flannery O'Connor. His play, Primary Care, was written with the collaboration of Thomas R. Cole and deals with quality-of-life issues in the context of advanced Alzheimer's Disease. It has been performed for general and health care audiences in South Carolina and Chicago as well as Houston and Galveston. Dr. Monroe teaches courses in Literature and Medicine, American Fiction, and the honors "great books" sequence, The Human Situation. Since 1994 he has directed The Common Ground Teachers Institute, a summer program focusing on multicultural literature. His book, Power to Hurt: The Virtues of Alienation, was named an outstanding academic book of the year by Choice magazine and nominated for the Phi Beta Kappa Christian Gauss Book Award. He is currently at work on a book manuscript entitled The Vocation of Affliction: Flannery O'Connor and American Mastery.
Special Members
Lynn Cutrer
Lynn Cutrer, Manager of Patient and Community Relations and Coordinator of the UT Volunteers Tender Loving Care Program, has been a tireless patient advocate on behalf of friends, faculty and employees of the University of Texas Health Science Center for the past four years. In this capacity Lynn helps patients navigate the often complicated world of health care and guides them with a gentle and helping hand. In her newest role she is spearheading a volunteer program in the University clinics. Lynn created and directs the elective Kinder Better Doctors. In her capacity as an educator, Lynn directs students in the Memorial Herman Hospital LifeFlight critical care waiting room on how to deliver bad news, how to comfort families and how to manage in stressful situations. She is also the co-director of the Healer's Art course taught to first and second-year medical students. Lynn founded with Pastoral Care the Hermann Partners in Waiting Program which is still in use today. She is a member of the Memorial Hermann Ethic's Committee and Hermann Hospital's Volunteer Board on which she served as president and was named Volunteer of the Year.
Megan Cole, Artist-in-Residence
Megan Cole has had a long acting career on the professional stage, and has in recent years also made television guest-star appearances on "Seinfeld," "ER," "The Practice," various "Star Treks," "Judging Amy," "Las Vegas," and others.
The recipient of assorted L.A. acting awards, Ms. Cole originated the leading role in Margaret Edson's Pulitzer Prize-winning drama WIT in 1995 and has subsequently performed the role in three other productions. She also tours with "The Wisdom of WIT," her solo version of the play.
Since 2000 Ms. Cole has been Artist-in-Residence at the University of Texas/Houston, where she conducts a series of workshops on empathic communication between caregivers and patients, based on a model of actor training. She also leads classes on Literature and Medicine, and gives numerous public talks on the human face of medicine for health-related and end-of-life care organizations.
She and the film actor William Hurt have collaborated with Houston's M.D. Anderson Cancer Center on a series of educational tapes for oncologists relating to the personal aspects of cancer care. Megan Cole makes her home on the North Oregon Coast with her husband and two cats.
