Ophelia Dahl ’94
Founder and Board Chair, Partners in Health

Ophelia Dahl
In 1983, aged 18, Ophelia Dahl landed in Haiti to work as a volunteer in a school for handicap children.

She was indelibly marked by what she saw there: the ill health that stalks the lives of the poor, and the inequities and injustices that underlie it.

Together with Paul Farmer, whom she met that first year in rural Mirebalais, and other friends, she co-founded Partners In Health—and has been learning from Haiti, and from the patients and communities PIH serves around the world, ever since. PIH delivers high-quality health care to the poor, from Haiti to the Navajo Nation, Siberia to Rwanda, and, most recently, in West Africa in the wake of the Ebola epidemic there. Ophelia served as Executive Director of PIH from 2001-2015, and now chairs the Board of Directors, helping PIH continue to build health care systems in remote areas of the world and to raise standards in global health.

Ophelia graduated from Wellesley College in 1994 and recently became a Trustee. She is a Director’s Fellow at MIT’s Media Lab and Vice President of the Roald Dahl Museum and Story Centre. She also co-directs her late father’s literary estate.