This week: April 10, 2026 - Bita Golshan Lotfi - Attorney, Private Practice
About Interfaith Works Administrave Offices – next to Rockville United Methodist Church 114 West Montgomery Ave., Rockville, MD 20850; 301.762.8682 Interfaith Works, founded in 1972, is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit agency and a non-sectarian interfaith coalion of more than 165 affiliated congregaons of diverse faiths, working together to meet the needs of the poor and homeless in Montgomery County, Md.
Chief Execuve Officer Shane Rock joined Interfaith Works following an extensive career in the nonprofit, social service and advocacy worlds. Aer graduang from law school, he became execuve director of Good Neighbor Mission, a homeless shelter in rural Tennessee helping people living in extreme poverty. In the two decades that have followed, Shane’s career has encompassed a range of social jusce concerns while remaining focused on helping people who lack economic opportunity. Most recently, Shane was director of operaons for senior services for the Jewish Social Services Agency in Rockville. He has a bachelor of arts degree in government and philosophy from Oberlin College and a J.D. from Vanderbilt University Law School.
“Le unsung, the noblest deed will die.” Pindar from Isthmean Odes”
“Titanic in its concentraon of will, with unprecedented triumph in all spheres of material aggrandizement, its civilizaon yet produces as a whole a singular impression of insufficiency, of empness.” José Enrique Rodó from Ariel
On May 1, 2013, The New York Times reported that President Evo Morales announced he was expelling the United States Agency for Internaonal Development (USAID) from Bolivia. He was quoted as saying, “Some instuons of the United States Embassy connue to conspire against . . . the people [of Bolivia] and especially against the country….” and as a result, “We have decided to expel U.S.A.I.D. from Bolivia.” Aer receiving more than $4.7 billion of U.S. taxpayer funds over the past 70 years to support development efforts in Bolivia, how could Morales decide the USAID relaonship should be terminated in such an abrupt manner? The answer to this queson is rooted in a complex slice of history beginning with the assistance provided to Bolivia by the U.S. Government during World War II.
Lawrence C. Heilman is research associate in the Anthropology Department at the Smithsonian Naonal Museum of Natural History. He served twenty years with USAID as a senior foreign service officer.
For the most comprehensive and longest running longitudinal examinaon of human aging in the world, NIA’s Balmore Longitudinal Study of Aging (BLSA) had a simple beginning. It started with a conversaon in 1958 between Nathan Shock, Ph.D., Chief of the Gerontology Branch at the Naonal Instutes of Health (NIH), and William W. Peter, M.D., a rered U.S. Public Health Service officer and missionary doctor. Peter had a long-established reputaon for his dedicaon to medicine and wanted to know how he could make a final contribuon—donang his body to science. But Shock had something else in mind. He wanted to discuss with Peter the direcon he believed aging research should take.
Breaking with scienfic convenon, Shock wanted to study normal aging, and he wanted to do it by repeatedly evaluang the same people over me. He hypothesized that important concepts pernent to aging could only be understood by looking at healthy, independently living people at regular intervals over a number of years. Shock didn’t just want bodies donated to study aging aer death; he wanted living people parcipang in scienfic studies. It was a radical concept that intrigued Peter. He volunteered to be the first parcipant.
Soon, Shock and Peter were joined by study coordinator Arthur Norris, described by Shock as his “steady right hand.” The three men outlined the new study’s parameters. The BLSA would “observe and document the physical, mental, and emoonal effects of the aging process in healthy, acve people.”
Women were not originally part of the study design but joined the BLSA in 1978, offering sciensts the opportunity to beer understand the influence of sex on aging, especially important because at the me, women lived 8 to 9 years longer than men. Many of the original female parcipants were wives or widows of male volunteers. Today, NIA’s Intramural Research Program in Balmore welcomes more than 1,300 male and female BLSA parcipants ranging in age from their twenes to ninees, who come regularly for a variety of tests to help sciensts observe changes over years of life.
