James C. Thomas

Dr. James (Jim) Thomas is an emeritus professor of epidemiology in the Gillings School of Global Public Health at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. He currently teaches courses in global health annually at the French École des Hautes Études en Santé Publique. As a social epidemiologist, he researched social forces such as mass incarceration affecting the distribution of infectious diseases in communities. For eight years he was the Director of the USAID-funded MEASURE Evaluation Project to strengthen health information systems in low- and middle-income countries. Dr. Thomas was the principal author of the first American public health code of ethics and was an ethics advisor to the Director of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. He received from the American Public Health Association the Distinguished Career Award in Ethics. He has worked on epidemiology or ethics in more than forty countries. He is the author of But I Meant Well: Unlearning Colonial Ways of Doing Good. He is currently writing a sequel on non-colonial ways of doing good.