2026-2027 Alvin F. Poussaint, MD Visiting Lecture

Registration and more info coming soon.

Speaker: 

Nancy E. Oriol, MD 
Associate Dean for Community Engagement in Medical Education
Associate Professor of Anesthesiology, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center 
Faculty Associate Director, The Family Van, Global Health and Social Medicine 
Harvard Medical School

About the speaker:

Dr. Nancy Oriol is Faculty Associate Dean for Community Engagement in Medical Education at Harvard Medical School, Faculty Associate Director of The Family Van and Associate Professor of Anesthesiology. She is an anesthesiologist whose career bridges clinical innovation, education, and community health. For more than two decades, she was the Director of Obstetric Anesthesiology at the Beth Isreal Deaconess Medical Center  where she pioneered the “walking epidural” and cared for thousands of laboring patients. Her bedside work shaped her conviction that safe, respectful, and person‑centered care should be available to everyone, not only to those who can reach major academic hospitals and led directly to her co‑creating The Family Van, a mobile health clinic that brings preventive services, health education, and care navigation directly into Boston’s neighborhoods. This model of care has demonstrated improvements in health outcomes and cost savings and inspired similar programs across the country as well as being the nidus for developing the first national registry and resource portal for mobile clinics, Mobile Health Map.

Dr Oriol graduated from HMS in 1979 and has been an active member of the teaching faculty ever since, holding multiple leadership roles in medical education, student affairs, and faculty affairs, including: faculty in the core curriculum for over 25 years, Dean for Students for 19 years and the elected Vice Chair of Faculty Council for 6 years. In her current role, she designs and supports programs that connect medical education with the lived realities of patients and communities, bringing issues of equity, trust, and access into the core of the curriculum. Committed to reaching even earlier in the pipeline, Dr. Oriol co-founded HMS MEDscience, an immersive, simulation‑based biology course for high school students. Using realistic medical emergencies and team‑based problem solving, the program makes science tangible, builds confidence, and opens pathways into medicine and STEM and is offered in over one hundred local public and private schools and reaches over 4000 students a year.

Whether the operating room, the classroom, or the streets of Boston, this work has a single goal, to redesign medicine and medical education around access, human connection, and the strengths of the communities she serves.