04/02/2026
🔦Shining the SPOTLIGHT💥 VCU’s Sally Hanson, M.D.
It was at the VCU School of Medicine where Hanson found support for what she calls her “crazy ideas.”
After earning her medical degree in 2006, she completed her residency at the Johns Hopkins Hospital before working internationally with Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors without Borders) and spending over a decade serving Indigenous communities in Alaska through the Indian Health Service.
“I've always said I’m going to work in the most challenging places with the people who need the most help,” said Hanson, director of Global Health Programs at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, a major teaching hospital of Harvard Medical School.
Since 2022, Hanson, her husband and four children have been based in Gaborone, Botswana, where she spends 75% of her time building sustainable women’s health initiatives and teaching residents through the Botswana Harvard Health Partnership. The remainder of the year she returns to Boston, where she is a member of the Harvard Medical Faculty Physicians.
“Having a baby or being a doctor is the same no matter where you are,” Hanson said. “But in Botswana, I’m definitely a ‘boots on the ground’ person as one of their few faculty members. We wear a lot of hats.”
Advice for global health: ‘Stay humble and curious’
Hanson discovered her passion for global health and reproductive health care while she was an undergraduate at George Mason University. In the late 1990s, she worked in a clinic that saw a significant number of HIV patients at a time before anti-retroviral treatments and therapies were widely available.
“It captivated me that the people who were most impacted by that disease faced factors that were out of their control, people that were in some way vulnerable,” Hanson said.
The observation later inspired her to want to work in places where patients had less access to care. “I chose to come to the MCV Campus because of its philosophy of being completely immersed in the community.”
FULL ARTICLE: news.vcu.edu/article/alum-rises-to-the-challenge-of-helping-vulnerable-populations-around-the-globe
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