Jacob Kendall

I work on the parts of aging that fall between everyone else’s job descriptions — the gaps between medicine and meaning, between what a discharge summary says and what a family actually needs. I hold a medical school PhD in aging, plus graduate degrees in public health, social work, and religion — an unusual combination I use as a set of lenses, switching between them mid-sentence to help audiences see a familiar problem differently. Before I was translating aging and public health for general audiences, I was teaching them: as a professor at two universities, I designed and delivered more than a dozen original courses on health equity, chronic disease, and the social determinants of health, rated 4.5/5 on evaluations. I've carried that same instinct for making complicated material land — for non-experts, in a room, on a stage, across 40+ podcast appearances — into talks and consulting for healthcare and nonprofit leaders. None of this is theoretical for me. I've navigated healthcare myself through two open-heart surgeries, and I've been a caregiver for both parents after debilitating strokes and heart attacks. That combination — credentials to explain the system, scar tissue from being inside it — keeps my talks from sounding like a policy brief. I'm also a builder by inclination: someone who starts ventures from a real problem and figures it out in public. That shows up on stage as a habit of turning the abstract into the concrete. I speak on how aging doesn’t happen in a vacuum and is connected to everything else. Ask me to prove it. Finally, I feed my wide-ranging curiosity through reading (quantum physics to Stephen King), film, birdwatching, and travel (25 countries and counting). I live on Mobile Bay in Alabama, with my wife and our two children.