July 22, 2026
A Career Built on Collaboration: Dr. Lauren Herbert Receives the 2026 Walter C. Reynolds M.D. Community Service Award
Some careers in medicine are measured in patients seen or procedures performed. Lauren Herbert’s is measured differently: in clinics built alongside communities, in relationships sustained across borders and decades, and in the quiet conviction that good medicine and social justice are not separate callings, but one and the same.
This year, that career is being formally recognized. Lauren Herbert, MD, has been awarded the 2026 Walter C. Reynolds M.D. Community Service Award from the OHSU School of Medicine Alumni Association. Established in 2022, the award honors the life and legacy of Walter C. Reynolds, M.D. ’49, a physician, community leader, and the first African American graduate of the University of Oregon Medical School, now OHSU School of Medicine. It recognizes those who have advanced the profession of medicine through leadership, scholarship, or the development of the next generation of health professionals. Few careers fit that description as fully as Dr. Herbert’s.
Fittingly, she recently received this honor at her 40th medical school reunion, two years into retirement, and decades into a career that spanned Eugene-Springfield, El Salvador, West Africa, Indonesia, and Greece. “It means a lot to me to have recognition from my medical school and classmates for this work,” she says, adding that it was already enough to have had the chance to work alongside so many people for a cause she believed in deeply.
A Friendship That Shaped a Career
Dr. Herbert’s international outlook took shape early, alongside her medical school classmate Elizabeth Gardner Stratte, MD. During her fourth year of medical school, Dr. Herbert spent two months at the Medical Research Council Hospital and Clinics in The Gambia. On her way back to the US, she stopped in London to visit Dr. Stratte, who was studying at the London School of Tropical Medicine, and ended up staying a month, completing a pediatric cardiology rotation with her at Great Ormond Street Children’s Hospital. Both women went on to match at Oakland Children’s Hospital for residency, where they were housemates.
That decades-long friendship came full circle this year: it was Dr. Stratte who nominated Dr. Herbert for the Walter C. Reynolds M.D. Community Service Award. “Dr. Lauren Herbert exemplifies the best qualities of a physician and a zealous commitment to service both at home and abroad,” Dr. Stratte wrote in her nomination.
Where the Journey Started
Dr. Herbert had originally planned to practice in Latin America after finishing her training, but her years in medical school, residency, and fellowship revealed a different opportunity: a role for a Spanish-speaking pediatrician in the US. When she and her husband began looking for a place to raise their own children, they returned to the Eugene-Springfield area, where she had grown up. There, they found a growing Latinx population and a real shortage of Spanish-speaking pediatric providers. Her background as a pediatric infectious diseases specialist gave her even more to offer a community that needed it.
Building a Clinic on Tasajera Island
Some of the most enduring work of Dr. Herbert’s career took root nearly 3,000 miles away, on the small island of Tasajera off the coast of El Salvador. While working for PeaceHealth Medical Group, she made three trips to provide care in underserved Salvadoran communities. On the third, she met Dr. Perez, a Salvadoran physician already working on the island, and found in him a partner for something more lasting than a short-term mission trip.
The island’s health committee had long dreamed of a clinic of their own, one that could offer consistent, accessible care rather than occasional visits from outside volunteers. That dream became real through an unusual collaborative effort: Dr. Herbert’s church provided funding, her architect father designed the building, and Dr. Perez’s uncle, an engineer, drew up the working plans. Volunteers traveled from Oregon to build it under the guidance of islanders experienced in construction, and medical volunteers joined Dr. Perez and local staff to begin providing care.
The partnership didn’t stop there. One volunteer, an RN from Bellingham, helped local women start a sewing cooperative in collaboration with a community development nonprofit. Over time, the church’s role shifted from funding direct medical care to funding scholarships that let island youth travel off-island for high school and college.
Even the clinic’s telemedicine efforts reflect the same spirit of adaptation and partnership. Poor WiFi on the island has made remote care a persistent challenge, but Dr. Perez stays in cell phone contact with the health promoter and health committee, sometimes relying on photos sent by phone to guide care from a distance. About two years ago, the Salvadoran government built a second clinic on the other end of the island, now staffed by its own doctors, a sign, in many ways, of just how far the original vision has traveled.
Turning Toward Advocacy
Around 2016, Dr. Herbert’s focus shifted more directly toward advocacy at home. Nearly all of the children in her clinic were the children of immigrants from Latin America, and in the lead-up to and aftermath of that year’s election, many of those families experienced rising racism and discrimination. “I felt that it was my responsibility as a citizen to stand beside and advocate for this community I loved,” she says.
That commitment led to a defining trip in 2019, when Senator Ron Wyden’s staff invited Dr. Herbert to accompany the Senator to the border after hearing her speak publicly about the harm caused by family separation policy. In El Paso, she met with medical providers and community advocates, visited the Paso Del Norte Port of Entry to assess conditions for detained families, and toured a shelter in Ciudad Juárez housing asylum seekers, a temporary home for unaccompanied children, and the Otero County Processing Center. She’s candid that the trip didn’t create her sense of urgency, as she already felt that from the families in her own clinic, but rather that it deepened her outrage at what she witnessed.
Lessons from Around the World
Dr. Herbert’s international work, in El Salvador, Africa, Indonesia, and Greece, resists being reduced to a single defining moment. What ties it together, she says, is a shift in posture: rather than arriving in a community to provide care, she learned to arrive in partnership with local providers, ready to learn as much as to teach, and with humility at the center of the work.
That humility was tested most starkly on Lesbos, where she worked with refugees who had fled violence in Syria, Iraq, Nigeria, Pakistan, and elsewhere. The camp was, in her words, a city of tents, filled with people who had no way of knowing how long they’d wait or whether they’d ever leave. Even there, she found that kindness and gentle words were still possible in the exam room. The medical care may have felt inadequate against the scale of the need, but she believed it mattered, especially in a world where, too often, eyes turn away.
Giving Back at Home
Dr. Herbert’s community commitment extended close to home as well. Working with the Migrant Education Program and Mount Pisgah Arboretum, and supported by an AAP CATCH grant, she helped establish a program improving access to nature for migrant youth and their families. She also partnered with the local NAACP to secure a grant funding a mentorship program for BIPOC youth interested in healthcare careers. For two decades, she served on the American Board of Pediatrics, first writing infectious disease exam questions and later helping a team of a dozen or so pediatricians shape the current Maintenance of Certification exam; quiet, sustained work in service of the profession itself.
A Legacy of Partnership
Asked what she’d want a young pediatrician or medical student to take from her story, Dr. Herbert points to the deep social and environmental roots of so many medical problems (e.g., inequity, climate change, violence, oppression), and to the fact that physicians can address those roots while still delivering immediate care. She made room in her own career for public meetings, lobbying with the Oregon Pediatric Society, and national advocacy through Reach Out and Read and the Pew Memorial Trust.
Reflecting on it all, Dr. Herbert says she feels she has received more than she has given. Watching children in her clinic grow, graduate, and give back to their own communities; working across borders to build lasting care in El Salvador; and witnessing extraordinary kindness and generosity in some of the world’s hardest places.
“I feel like I have seen the best of humanity,” she says. “Sometimes the brightest lights shine in the darkest situations.”
The Oregon Pediatric Society is proud to celebrate Dr. Lauren Herbert’s nomination for the 2026 Walter C. Reynolds M.D. Community Service Award, a fitting tribute to a career defined not by what one person accomplished alone, but by what became possible in partnership with others. Congratulations Dr. Herbert!
Dr. Herbert’s career is a reminder of what is possible when pediatric providers commit to something bigger than any one clinic. The Oregon Pediatric Society exists to support that same spirit of collaboration among Oregon’s pediatric community and we encourage you to be part of it.
If you’re not yet a member, consider joining OPS. Membership connects you with pediatric providers across the state who are advocating for kids, supporting each other, and building the kind of collective impact that no one person can create alone.
And if you are already a member, there is an easy next step: get involved with one of our six committees. Whether your interests lie in advocacy, education, membership, or finance, there is a place for your voice and expertise. Together, we can change more lives than we ever could alone.
Learn more about OPS and how our members are making an impact in Oregon: www.oraap.org.
