Sonal Shah Tapped to Lead the Asian American Foundation
TAAF
Sonal Shah was President Obama’s first director of the White House’s Office of Social Innovation and Civic Participation.
The Asian American Foundation
Sonal Shah, a professor and founding executive director of the Beeck Center for Social Impact and Innovation at Georgetown University, has been named president of this new foundation. Shah was President Obama’s first director of the White House’s Office of Social Innovation and Civic Participation.
The foundation was created with an initial $125 million in donations from its board of directors, and it intends to raise additional money to make grants to Asian American and Pacific Islander organizations and causes over the next five years.
By JEFFRY STANTON
A new study from Harvard University and an international team of researchers suggests that high levels of Internet use could affect the brain’s structure as well as our attentional capacities, memory processes and social interactions.
According to another, less scientific report from Microsoft, our digital-age attention spans have dwindled to a second shorter than that of a goldfish or less than the time it might take to read this paragraph.
With seemingly never-ending demands at work and home, conditions such as anxiety, distraction, fatigue and depression can become constant companions for many people. Left unchecked, stress wreaks havoc on our bodies, and it contributes to health issues from high blood pressure and heart disease to obesity and diabetes.
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I met Nina Crist over Zoom in late February, after a mutual friend had introduced us, thinking we’d enjoy working together. Nina teaches yoga and martial arts, but what really hooked me was that when she was 17, she left home to live as a disciple at a black belt dojo in the woods in northern Maine. On this 30-acre property a portion of which was only accessible by canoe she inhabited a small cabin, heated only by a wood stove.
What can I say? I have a thing for strong women who make their own way.
PITTSFIELD â The COVID-19 pandemic disrupted everything during the past 12 months, and the Berkshire County economy was no exception.
As the regionâs economy begins to recover, itâs worth looking back at where the Berkshires have been, businesswise, since March 2020. Here is a brief retrospective of some of the events that have taken place.
Learning to pivot
Berkshire Sterile Manufacturing in Lee uses state-of-the-art technology to produce sterile injectable drugs for pharmaceutical and biotech companies that are in clinical studies for the treatment of diseases. It originally was approached by the federal government in early March 2020, to gauge its interest in helping to develop a COVID-19 vaccine. Instead, the company used its facilities to help clients develop medications for people who had contracted the virus.