Meet Global Health Track Director Olga Valdman, MD

Olga Valdman, MD, Director of the Family Medicine Global Health Track, can trace her own interest in international medicine to her past as an immigrant from Russia.  She is a 2009 UMass Chan Medical School graduate who completed her medical training at the Lawrence Family Medicine Residency and returned to her alma mater as faculty right after residency graduation.  She has been directing the department's Global Health Track since 2013.  

Olga's interest in global health was nurtured at UMass Chan Medical School when she worked in as remote village of Nicaragua and began learning Spanish.  She completed a community clerkship in refugee and immigrant health which led to her involvement in organizing a tutoring program for members of the African refugee community. These efforts in turn led her to co-found, while still a medical student, a highly respected and successful non-profit organization called the African Community Education program (ACE).  This organization is still thriving today and Olga continues to serve on the Board of Directors. 

Olga's extensive travel abroad includes trips to the Dominican Republic, Nicaragua, Ghana, Ethiopia, Mexico, India, and Liberia. She collaborates and builds partnerships with community stakeholders at every site she visits, working collaboratively to build up community capacity. Through a USAID grant, she collaborated with the West African College of Physicians and ELWA Hospital in Monrovia to build Liberia's first family medicine residency program. This program is now locally administered and continues to train and graduate high-quality family physicians.  

Most recently, Olga responded to the deep need for expansion of community medical services for Worcester's refugee and immigrant populations by founding yet another non-profit organization called Worcester RISE for Health. RISE's mission is to provide effective, culturally sensitive, trauma-informed, and community-grounded healthcare interventions that eliminate barriers and help refugees and immigrants achieve health equity and self-sufficiency through innovation, co-location, capacity-building, and collaboration. Many Worcester and Fitchburg residents in the Global Health Track work with Olga at the RISE clinic, which they have found to be a rich local-global educational experience.  

To learn more about the Global Health Track, please contact Olga at Olga.Valdman2@umassmed.edu.