Meet Valerie Palmer, Diversity Advisory Council Member
“Working at OHSU provides the ability to collaborate with many different groups, develop links and build partnerships with communities and corporations.”
Valerie S. Palmer
Director of Neurotoxicogenomics Labs
Center for Research on Occupational and Environmental Toxicology (CROET)
Valerie was born in a rural farming community in South Africa. She grew up assisting her father with sugar farming and caring for her siblings and sick people in the community. Surrounded by racial discrimination from within the community and government, poverty, disease and shortages of food, water and firewood, she experienced many hardships. With no hope of receiving a higher education and under constant fear of political persecution, Valerie left South Africa at the age of 17 for London. Valerie was refused asylum in Britain, so she then traveled to New York and was granted asylum in the US. She studied and worked as a Dental Ceramist for a few years, married and raised a daughter and developed a small business. Settled in the US, Valerie sought opportunities to fulfill her dream of studying and contributing to the health of the underserved in less-developed worlds. Between 1983 and 1988, Valerie served as a research consultant at New York’s Albert Einstein College of Medicine Institute of Neurotoxicology, where she participated in expeditions to understand the causes of neurodegenerative diseases among the indigenous people of Africa, Asia, and Oceania. She also founded the Third World Medical Research Foundation to sponsor and conduct multidisciplinary research and education on nutritional, toxic and other disorders affecting the poorest of the poor.
After moving to Oregon, she continued her studies of biology, chemistry and genetics at Eastern Oregon University and PSU and worked at OHSU researching Konzo, a nutritional toxic disease in sub-Saharan Africa. For a while, she joined the SOM department of Neurology, initially as a volunteer in the Movement Disorders Clinic and later as an ALS (Lou Gehrig’s disease) Researcher working with Gulf war veterans nationally. Valerie is now head of CROET’s toxicogenomics laboratory, where she is a member of a research team investigating gene-chemical interactions that result in crippling diseases. In addition to serving on the DAC, Valerie is on the President’s Steering Committee of the OHSU Global Health Center (GHC), is the coordinator of GHC’s refugee communities Health & Wellness project, and a Member of the Institutional Review Board for human research subjects. She was recently appointed to the board of Portland’s Immigrant Refugee Community Organization (IRCO) and serves as President of IRCO’s Africa House. Valerie is seeking opportunities to promote the assimilation, development and success of Portland’s recent immigrants and refugees. She is orchestrating collaboration among students, faculty and community members to address disparities and inequities among the poor. Her long-term goal is to develop centers for research and education on the African continent; one of which is in progress in Congo, South Africa and Kenya.
Valerie has participated in the development and organization of many international research educational workshops and conferences, was nominated for the Africa Prize for The Sustainable End to Hunger in 1988 for her work on the International Network for the Improvement of Lathyrus sativus and Eradication of Lathyrism (a nutritional motor neuron disease in India and Africa),has been recognized for her work with the African Society of Toxicological Sciences, and has co-authored numerous scientific papers and contributed to scholarly texts. She is happy to be continuing her career at OHSU because it allows the ability work with different groups and build partnerships throughout the community here and internationally. This cooperation has helped her gain a better understanding of the many cultures and groups that make up the ever-expanding Oregon community.
