Olga Valdman MD
Executive Director
Dr. Olga Valdman is the Founder and Executive Director of Worcester RISE for Health and an Assistant professor of Family Medicine and Community Health at the University of Massachusetts Chan Medical School (UMass).
Dr. Valdman has devoted her career to working with vulnerable populations locally and globally. Her work with the refugee community of Worcester began during medical school when as a medical student she co-founded the African Community Education program together with Kaska Yawo. ACE is a non-profit that provides educational support for youth and families from the African continent and has grown from a volunteer organization to one of the prominent non-profits in Worcester serving refugee and immigrant communities.
After completing her residency at Greater Lawrence Family Health Center, Dr. Valdman returned to Worcester because of her connection with ACE and with the Worcester refugee and immigrant community. She joined the Family Health Center of Worcester (FHCW) where she spent a decade building robust refugee health programs. Under her leadership, FHCW created a dedicated team devoted to serving newly arriving refugees and immigrants with nursing, medical assistants, and patient navigators; she worked hard to recruit staff that would reflect the patients served by the clinic. Dr. Valdman also developed a Global Health fellowship which attracted Family Medicine physicians passionate about global health globally and locally. Locally, fellows were trained in refugee and asylum care and became highly sought-after experts in the field. Dr. Valdman left Family Health Center in December of 2022 to create Worcester RISE for Health as she believes the care for newly arriving refugees and immigrants must be integrated into the community and requires a different approach from the “mainstream health system”.
Over the past decade, Dr. Valdman has built strong relationships and partnerships with the refugee resettlement agencies and the refugee & immigrant-serving organizations in Worcester. She currently leads the Worcester Refugee Health Collaborative which holds monthly meetings and engages all refugee-serving organizations in the city of Worcester including the three resettlement agencies and the two community health centers.
At Umass, Dr. Valdman serves as the Director of Global Health programs in the Family Medicine department. In that role, she has established and maintained partnerships in the Dominican Republic, Nicaragua, Liberia, Kenya, and Ghana. Through a $1.5 million grant from USAID, her team partnered with colleagues in Liberia to help build the first Family Medicine Residency training program there. Additionally, she has recently partnered with colleagues to launch a robust Spanish Language training program for Family Medicine residents and is excited to see Family Medicine physicians graduating fluent in the Spanish language with a deep appreciation for the Latinx communities of Worcester.
Dr. Valdman serves as the advisor to the student Refugee Health Interest Group at Umass Chan and hopes to see medical students take a more active role in supporting Worcester refugee and immigrant communities. Nationally, Dr. Valdman is a member of the Society for Refugee Health Providers, presented at multiple conferences on topics of refugee health, global health, and border health, and is a recipient of awards and recognitions including the Pisacano Leadership Award by the American Board of Family Medicine, Mass League Community Health Center Special Project award, Faculty Excellence Award, and Rotary International Humanitarian Award.
Dr. Valdman speaks Spanish, Russian, and English.