New Board Members Charles Hesdorffer and Marsha Rozenblit

The LBI Board of Trustees has elected two new members, a prominent physician and medical researcher who is the son of a concentration camp survivor, and the scholar who heads the Institute’s Academic Advisory Board.

Charles Hesdorffer completed his medical training in Johannesburg, South Africa in 1978. After completing his residency he emigrated to the US in 1986, where he undertook a research fellowship in Hematology and Oncology at Columbia University in New York. After joining the faculty at Columbia, he started the Bone Marrow Transplant and Cell Therapy Programs in 1986. In 2005 he moved to Johns Hopkins and subsequently to the NIH/National Institute on Aging where he became involved in determining the cause of the “Anemia of Aging” as well as defi ning the role that infl ammation plays in aging and immune senescence. Following a further 5 years running the Translational Medicine Research Group at the VA Medical Center in Washington DC, he retired as a Professor of Medicine at George Washington Medical Center and the Armed Forces College of Medicine in 2017 and joined the National Heart Lung and Blood Institute at the NIH in Bethesda, Maryland where he presently continues as a Special Volunteer in the Hematology Service.

Hesdorffer’s connection to the LBI began when his father, Heinz Hesdorff er, a survivor of several concentration camps, emigrated from South Africa to join his family in the USA in 2004. Through the auspices of the LBI, Heinz published a book on his experiences. Late in life, Heinz often returned to Germany to tell his story at schools and other educational institutions. Charles is eager to support the LBI’s mission, furthering and expanding upon his father’s educational work.

Marsha Rozenblit is the Harvey M. Meyerhoff Professor of Modern Jewish History at the University of Maryland, where she has been on the faculty since 1978. A social historian of the Jews of Austria-Hungary and its successor states, she is the author of: The Jews of Vienna, 1867–1914: Assimilation and Identity (1983) and Reconstructing a National Identity: The Jews of Habsburg Austria during World War I (2001). Between 1998 and 2003 she served as the director of the Meyerhoff Center for Jewish Studies at the University of Maryland. She served as president of the Association for Jewish Studies between 2009 and 2011 and has been a fellow of the American Academy for Jewish Research since 2000. Rozenblit is currently the chair of the LBI Academic Advisory Board and has been recently elected to the LBI Board as an ex officio member.

From LBI News 114.