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Linda Ogilvie, ’93 PhD, narrates her career so matter-of-factly you’d be lulled into thinking it was normal for a Canadian nurse in the 1970s to work in Papua New Guinea. Or go to Ghana to study nursing roles in primary health care. Or help develop a graduate education program in Ghana. But she has changed health-care systems and how nursing is viewed and taught.

In school, she wanted to be a doctor. “It was the 1960s,” Ogilvie says. “My brother did well in school and my family didn’t have money to send us both to university.” So she joined the school of nursing at the Hospital for Sick Children: it was health care and there was no tuition. After, she worked in a pediatric ICU and did an undergrad in Toronto, followed by a few years teaching nursing in Papua New Guinea. Back in Canada she earned a master’s and gained more clinical experience.

“I intended to work internationally,” she says, and she figured experience teaching in a Canadian university would broaden her opportunities overseas. So she applied at the ��������, which had a condition: earn a PhD.

Her doctoral work explored nursing in primary health care in Ghana. She was interested in how social contexts affect nursing roles and contributions to health care. Both Ghana and Papua New Guinea had similar geographic and resource challenges, she explains. “But nurses were highly regarded in Papua New Guinea. That wasn’t the case then in Ghana.”

A new opportunity presented itself when the �������� was invited by the University of Ghana to help develop a graduate-level nursing program. “Ghanaian nurses who went abroad for graduate degrees found work and seldom returned,” Ogilvie explains. So she collaborated on a proposal that received CIDA funding, and Ogilvie became the project director in the inaugural program. “It raised the level of health care in Ghana, and the status of the field of nursing.”

Ogilvie has mentored scores of students from around the world. “Nearly all my former PhD students have held academic positions and conducted policy-relevant research in international, Indigenous, and immigrant populations,” she says. “In my interesting, challenging career, what stands out are my amazing �������� colleagues.”

She recalls a time she wrote a page for her dean called “Working Across Differences” to outline her research. “I still think that sums it up. Everything I’ve done has been about collaborating across differences to meet a common goal.”