John W. Murphy has a PhD in sociology from Ohio State University. For the past thirty years he has been writing on and working in community-based projects in both the United States and several countries in Latin America. Most recently he worked on a project in Ecuador that was devoted to building a health center in a poor community. Currently he is a professor of sociology at the University of Miami. He is co-author of Symbolization of Globalization, Development, and Aging (2013) and Community-BAsed Interventions (2014), both with Springer.