Governance

Ms. Abramson, in addition to her position on the Heifetz board, is currently on the Board of Trustees for Friends of Cancer Research, Operations Embrace, Project Medishare and the MCPS Educational Foundation. She is President Emeritus of the American Committee of the Weizmann Institute of Science.

Laurence M. Cafritz, President and Owner of Laurence Cafritz Builders and Legend Construction, Inc., in Bethesda, MD, is a graduate of Sidwell Friends School and Lafayette College (BS Civil Engineering, Cum Laude and Honors). Larry has over 30 years experience building and remodeling hundreds of homes throughout the Washington, DC region. He served as President of the Custom Builders Council of the Maryland Building Industry Association (MBIA) from 2008-2021, and is a member of the MBIA Board of Directors. Larry resides with his wife, Sherri, in Bethesda, MD, where they raised their three boys.

Diana Ely Epstein is a native Washingtonian with a BA from Tufts University and Masters work in speech and drama at the University of Maryland. For the past 30 years she has been a radio and television personality in the Washington/Baltimore region. She does commercial voice-overs and narrations for local, regional and national clients. For six years, she was co-host of the award winning cable TV talk show, “Diana, Mike and the Rabbi.” She is active in local and national organizations such as Aish Hatorah, the National Gaucher Foundation, United Jewish Communities, Israel Bonds (twice co-chair of the annual prestigious Ambassadors Ball), Beth Sholom Congregation, Chabad Lubavitch, and the Melvin J. Berman Hebrew Academy, where she is a past president of the board of directors and current development chair.

With over 30 years of experience in the real estate business, Robin Miller specializes in identifying creative approaches to the rehabilitation and adaptive reuse of historic buildings. He has transformed the urban landscape of Richmond, Petersburg, and Staunton with a variety of development projects including numerous apartment and condominium projects, “green” urban in-fill projects, and large scale, new urbanist projects involving several buildings and numerous city blocks.

Dr. Jie Shen is Professor of Neurology at Harvard Medical School. She received her Ph.D. in molecular biology from the University of Virginia in 1995 studying the mechanisms of alternative splicing in Drosophila. As a postdoctoral fellow at MIT, she began the investigation of the molecular basis of Alzheimer’s disease using mouse genetic approaches. Since 1998, she has directed a molecular neurobiology laboratory whose major research interests focus on the pathogenesis of Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases. Her genetic studies have led to the proposal of the Presenilin Hypothesis, which posits that loss of presenilin function underlies neurodegeneration and dementia in the pathogenesis of Alzheimer’s disease. Her genetic analysis of gene products involved in Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases unexpectedly revealed that presynaptic defects in neurotransmitter release might underlie age-related neurodegeneration in these neurological disorders. Jie was the Director of the Udall Center of Excellence for Parkinson’s Disease at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, which focused on the role of LRRK2 and alpha-synuclein on the pathogenesis of Parkinson’s disease.

Amy Tang Seto is a partner and Endowments & Foundations senior advisor at Brown Advisory, and she serves as a resource to client teams in leading an acclaimed service model for endowments and foundations clients. Prior to joining the firm, Amy was the Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer at the Baltimore Community Foundation, where she held various executive, operations and financial management roles during her 13 years of tenure. In addition to her role at the Heifetz Institute, where she chairs the Nomination & Governance Committee, Amy serves as the President of the Baltimore-based Creative Alliance.  She is also a Director of BGE, an ExcelonCompany, a Trustee of the Leonard & Helen R. Stulman Charitable Foundation, and a Past Trustee of the Calvert School.