Justine Strand de Oliveira, DrPH, PA-C, DFAAPA, is recognized as a health policy leader with extensive domestic and international clinical and academic experience. As chair of the Texas Academy of PAs (TAPA) Legislative Committee and then as the organization’s pesident, she lobbied the first prescribing and licensing laws for PAs in Texas. (She served as TAPA president twice, in 1988 and then in 1993.) After moving to North Carolina, she was asked to lead legislative and governmental affairs efforts for the North Carolina Academy of PAs (NCAPA) to help formulate a legislative strategy to achieve a licensing law. While the state had a favorable practice environment, the enabling legislation was still delegatory at the time (mid-1990s) and a licensing law was needed. Under her leadership, the NCAPA hired its first lobbyist, who played an important role in gaining favorable legislation. From 2004 to 2007, she served as president of the North Carolina Medical Society Foundation, the first PA to hold this distinguished position. She is a former president (2009) of the PA Education Association (PAEA) and an emerita member of the North Carolina Institute of Medicine.
Dr. Strand de Oliveira graduated from the Duke University Physician Assistant Program in 1981. She is fluent in Spanish and served clinically as a bilingual health care provider at the Sunrise Community Health Center in Greeley, Colorado, at the Austin Regional Clinic in Texas and at the Durham County Health Department and Duke Family Medicine Center in North Carolina. She is also fluent in Portuguese, and worked for Westinghouse Corporation in Brazil from 1982 to 1984, caring for their employees and their families in Rio state. Putting her Portuguese language skills to good use, she served as the lead technical advisor to a project for the Ministry of Health in Mozambique, revising the curriculum for the técnicos de medicina (a PA analogue). She co-facilitated a leadership seminar for family physicians and residents at the WONCA Iberoamericano (the organization of family doctors for all Portuguese and Spanish speaking countries in the Americas and Europe) meeting in Montevideo, Uruguay in 2015.
Strand de Oliveira served as chief of the Duke University Physician Assistant Division from 1999 to 2012, and also served as program director from 2001 to 2003. While in this position, she attended and received her DrPH from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2008.
In 2013, Strand de Oliveira became the first PA to serve as a departmental vice chair at Duke University. She was the first PA to participate in several physician leadership seminars at Duke, and first PA to have a faculty appointment in the Duke School of Nursing. In addition, she was an affiliate member of the Duke Global Health Institute.
Strand de Oliveira created the first research group in the PA Division at Duke, which was recognized nationally for their work on the health care workforce. Her research interests include the sociology of professions and barriers to full utilization of nurse practitioners and PAs. She is a highly regarded scholar and has contributed several historical articles about prototypical PAs working in Puerto Rico and Sri Lanka. Her doctoral dissertation was focused on the sociocultural barriers to enabling legislation for PAs in Puerto Rico.
Strand de Oliveira is a distinguished fellow of the American Academy of Physician Associates (DFAAPA) and an inaugural member of Pi Alpha, the national PA honor society. Her awards and recognitions include being made a lifetime member of the Texas Academy of PAs (1994), named a Public Health Service Primary Care Policy Fellow in 1995, and awarded a Breitman-Dorn Endowed Research Fellowship by the PA Foundation in 2007. She was recognized as the Outstanding PA of the Year by the American Academy of PAs in 2005 and as the Alumnus of the Year by the Duke Physician Assistant Program in 2014.
Strand de Oliveira retired from Duke in 2017 and now holds the title of Professor Emeritus. She then moved to London to help establish the first PA program at the Barts and The London School of Medicine, part of Queen Mary University. Having accomplished that task, she moved with her husband to Portugal’s Algarve in 2019. She holds a faculty appointment as invited professor at the University of Algarve medical doctor course, where she teaches on an occasional basis.
Since her retirement, Dr. Strand de Oliveira has established a new career as a writer. She published her debut novel, The Moon Is Backwards, in 2022. This is a work of historical fiction about the mid-20th century dictatorship in Brazil, and it is available in Portuguese as a lua ao avesso. She is also an essayist, and publishes a weekly Substack about Portugal, Brazil and the US. In 2026 she is finishing her second novel, a murder mystery set in a Southern Ivy academic medical center.
To watch an interview with Dr. Strand de Oliveira, please click here.
To read Dr. Strand de Oliveira’s Substack article, Homage to Harvey Estes, please click here.
Acknowledgments:
This biography was written by Reginald Carter with the assistance of Dr. Justine Strand de Oliveira and was submitted to the Society in May 2015. The biography was updated by Dr. Strand de Oliveira in 2026. The portrait photograph and photograph with a “patient” taken in 1988 (actually a colleague posing as a patient) are courtesy of Dr. Strand de Oliveira.
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