Michael Verde grew up in east Texas, where he played football, went to church, raised show pigs, and read so much it alarmed his high school counselor.  Before graduating from high school, he won Guideposts magazine’s National Youth Writing Contest, and was elected president of American Legion’s Boy’s Nation.

Michael graduated with honors from the University of Texas’s prestigious Plan II Honors program.  He earned a M.A. in literary studies from the University of Iowa, and a M.A. in theology from the University of Durham, England, where he graduated at the top of his international class.

Michael taught English for 10 years.  At Lamar University where he began his teaching career he was named Teacher of the Year in his third year of teaching.

In 2011, Memory Bridge was awarded Indiana University’s Educational Peace Prize to bring the Memory Bridge school initiative to South Africa.

He is currently pursuing a PhD in the area of empathetic education at Indiana University.

Dwaine has worked in diverse areas of education beginning as an English teacher in an urban high school in Beaumont, Texas. He has worked on the academic and business sides of education in curriculum and instruction, federal programs, professional development, and human resources. Dwaine has built campus and district teams whose performance led to schools and the district achieving the highest academic ratings in the State of Texas.

Dwaine holds a B.S. in Criminal Justice, a B.A. in English, a M.Ed. in education, and is a doctorate from Lamar University, where he has also served as an adjunct instructor of student teachers. He was Beaumont ISD’s Texas A&M Teacher of the Year in 2001.

Additionally, Dwaine has received service awards from Lamar Institute of Technology and Leadership Southeast Texas. He has served on numerous advisory councils and board such as United Way of North Jefferson County, Advisory Council for Leadership Southeast Texas, and Advisory Director for the Greater Beaumont Chamber of Commerce.

For several years she was on contract to the American Society for Healthcare Engineering and the Facilities Guidelines Institute, providing editorial services for the Guidelines for Design and Construction of Health Care Facilities new volume on residential health, care, and support facilities, and for a white paper, Patient Handling and Movement Assessments. She was on the advisory committee that helped establish a club for individuals with early-stage dementia in the Washington, D.C., suburbs; she also was a volunteer in the Smithsonian’s Zoo on Wheels outreach program to senior centers. Currently she volunteers for Glover Park Village, where she compiled a directory of local nutrition programs and services, makes home visits, and advocates for Alzheimer’s education and caregiving.

From 1991 to 2006 Carla was Program/Publications Manager of the Smithsonian’s Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage. She conducted field research and organized programs for the Smithsonian Folklife Festival, working with community scholars, academics, and folk artists from cultural communities around the United States and a number of other countries. In addition to writing and editing the Center’s publications, she directed two fellowship programs, funded by the Rockefeller Foundation and Emory University. She was instrumental in insuring recognition for cognitively impaired members of the World War II generation at the “National World War II Reunion,” a major four-day event the Center produced to coincide with the dedication of the National World War II Memorial. Before moving to the Center, she worked for over 15 years at the Smithsonian’s Office of Interdisciplinary Studies. She has published two books as well as articles in the journal Knowledge. She holds a graduate degree in sociology from Columbia University.

For several years she was on contract to the American Society for Healthcare Engineering and the Facilities Guidelines Institute, providing editorial services for the Guidelines for Design and Construction of Health Care Facilities new volume on residential health, care, and support facilities, and for a white paper, Patient Handling and Movement Assessments. She was on the advisory committee that helped establish a club for individuals with early-stage dementia in the Washington, D.C., suburbs; she also was a volunteer in the Smithsonian’s Zoo on Wheels outreach program to senior centers. Currently she volunteers for Glover Park Village, where she compiled a directory of local nutrition programs and services, makes home visits, and advocates for Alzheimer’s education and caregiving.

June has worked closely with a variety of foundations to develop initiatives for multiple sclerosis, schizophrenia, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, Parkinson’s disease, and other disorders. She is also an entrepreneur, having co-founded N-of-One, Inc., a pioneering personalized oncology company.  Currently June is the Executive Director of the FSH Society (Facioscapulohumeral Muscular Dystrophy).

June serves on the Advisory Council for the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Science and Technology and the National Board of the BrightFocus Foundation. June began her career as a science journalist, working as a writer and editor for Scientific American, Science, The New York Times Magazine, and many other national publications. June and her husband Tod Machover live in Waltham, MA, where they tend to teenagers, cats, goats, and chickens. She enjoys music of all genres, from opera to American Idol.

Phil is active in research and publishing around issues of community development for age-friendly communities. He has employed the humanities as a tool for community development in projects funded by the Retirement Research Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and Indiana Humanities, including participatory public arts projects in public housing neighborhoods. He also serves as a consultant to a national project entitled The AdvantAge Initiative: Improving Communities for an Aging Society, an age-friendly community initiative conducted in nearly 40 U.S. cities. He is a past president of the Association for Anthropology and Gerontology and the Indiana Federation of Alzheimer’s Support Groups. He has published numerous articles on cultural aspects of dementia and the relationship between aging and place. His major publications include  Gray Areas: Ethnographic Encounters with Nursing Home Culture (2003, Santa Fe: SAR Press) and Elderburbia: Aging with a Sense of Place in America (2009: Praeger). He is currently editing a new volume entitled The Global Age-Friendly Community Movement: A Critical Perspective. In 2014, Phil was the recipient of the Walter S. Blackburn Award by the Indiana Chapter of the American Institute of Architects, for contributions to the field by a non-architect. In July, 2015, Phil presented a keynote address on Lifetime Communities at the 52nd International Making Cities Livable conference in Bristol, U.K.

Phil’s Center has partnered with the Memory Bridge Foundation in the development of the Memory Bridge Training Retreat, held in Bloomington each summer, with Center staff members contributing assistance with recruiting, hosting, scholarship selection, and audio-visual documentation and editing.