Posted by: Andrew Lavelle; 18 July 2019; 7:35 pm
Valerie Rzepka is a Primary Health Care Nurse Practitioner, Executive Director, and co-founder of Canadian Medical Assistance Teams (CMAT), a grassroots emergency medical response organization that provides medical aid in the wake of major global disasters.
In nearly 15 years of responding to disasters, Valerie has coordinated, supervised and deployed to medical projects in Thailand, Pakistan, China, Haiti, Chile, Japan, and the Philippines. Most recently, she oversaw CMAT’s immediate rapid assessment and coordinated the overall response to the 2015 Nepal earthquake. As a result of her collaboration in United Nations-led emergency responses, Valerie has consulted for the Pan American Health Organization in Washington, DC, and World Health Organization in Geneva, Switzerland as a subject-matter expert in Emergency Medical Response in the Emergency Medical Teams initiative.
She received her Bachelor of Science in Nursing from Ryerson University in Toronto, and her Master of Science in Health Policy jointly from the London School of Economics and diploma from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine in the United Kingdom. She completed the Primary Health Care Nurse Practitioner program at Laurentian University in 2013.