David E. Lapin

David E. Lapin is the author of Training for Life: Wellness and Working Out with Personal Trainers in Your Sixties and Beyond (2023) and The Education of Brainiac: A New Yorker’s Quest for the Good Life in the Hub of the Universe (2019). Born in the Bronx and raised in Puerto Rico and New York City, Lapin has lived in Boston since 1980. He has served on the boards of the Boston Center for the Arts, the Harvard Musical Association, the National Guild for Community Arts Education, and numerous citizen advisory committees on everything from arts education to air rights development over the Massachusetts Turnpike.

Lapin has also lectured and participated in panels for Berklee College of Music, Longy School of Music of Bard College, the Massachusetts Cultural Council and the New England Conservatory. He has been an advisor to The Learning Project in Boston’s Back Bay, Jamaica Plain’s Eliot School of Fine Arts, and EdVestors Boston Public Schools Arts Education Initiative. He continues to support Community Music Center of Boston—which he led from 1983 until 2017—as a member of its Corporation. He also chairs Harvard Musical Association’s Achievement Awards Committee.

Lapin holds a Ph.D. in political science from Yale University, and has taught at Yale and Cornell. His doctoral dissertation, No-Growth Democracy, explores the viability of democratic systems in the absence of economic growth.