Diverse Paths of Leadership and Innovation: Maia Olsen ’11

2 p.m. Friday, Feb. 23, 2018

Published:
July 27, 2017

Maia Olsen ’11
Maia Olsen ’11 will be a featured speaker in the Leading Innovation and Entrepreneurship speaker series on Friday, Feb. 23. The event, which is free and open to the public, will start at 2 p.m. in Noyce 1023. The Donald and Winifred Wilson Center for Innovation and Leadership is sponsoring the speaker series and associated course.

Olsen graduated Grinnell College with a bachelor's in anthropology and global development studies in 2011. She holds an masters in global health from Boston University and has a background in non-profit program administration and resource development, with experience working with organizations in Grinnell; Boston; Washington, D.C.; and northern Cameroon.

She is currently program manager of the non-communicable disease program at Partners In Health (PIH), a global health non-government organization (NGO) that works with local government officials and the world's leading medical and academic institutions to build capacity and strengthen health systems in some of the poorest settings of the world. In this role, she:

  • provides program management and fundraising support to PIH's programs across ten countries,
  • collaborates with clinicians and researchers to provide technical assistance to Ministries of Health looking to scale up integrated chronic care services in low-income countries,
  • and helps lead advocacy and communications efforts promoting country-led solutions and increased funding to better address noncommunicable diseases in settings of extreme poverty. 

In addition to her work at PIH, she has been volunteering with Global Oncology, Inc (GO) since 2013, where she led a project developing first-of-its-kind patient education materials for low-literate populations with cancer in sub-Saharan Africa and has assisted with a GO partnership in Malawi and an expert lecture series. She was named a 2013 Summer Graduate Fellow at the BU Frederick S. Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future, publishing a policy paper on “Cancer in Sub-Saharan Africa: The Need for New Paradigms in Global Health” as a result of this research in December 2015.

Grinnell College welcomes the participation of people with disabilities. Accommodation requests may be made to Conference Operations.
The College welcomes the presence of minors at all age-appropriate public events and for informal visits, with the understanding that a parent, legal guardian, or other responsible adult assumes full responsibility for their child’s safety and behavior during such visits or events. In these cases the College expects that an adult responsible for the visiting child takes measures to ensure the child’s safety and sees that the child complies with directions of College personnel. Grinnell College is not responsible for supervision of minors on campus.
Tagged as

We use cookies to enable essential services and functionality on our site, enhance your user experience, provide better service through personalized content, collect data on how visitors interact with our site, and enable advertising services.

To accept the use of cookies and continue on to the site, click "I Agree." For more information about our use of cookies and how to opt out, please refer to our website privacy policy.