Dr. Ulana Suprun has been working as Ukraine’s Minister of Healthcare since her appointment by the Cabinet of Ministers on July 27, 2016. During the last two years, she has successfully led an effort to reform and modernize Ukraine’s healthcare system, culminating in passage of key reform legislation in October 2017. Born to a Ukrainian-American family in Detroit, Michigan, she received her medical degree from Michigan State University College of Human Medicine in 1989. After more than 20 years of medical work in both Michigan and New York, Suprun moved to Ukraine in November 2013 during the Revolution of Dignity. There, she worked as a volunteer physician to treat injured protestors. In response to Russia’s subsequent annexation of Crimea and initiation of war in Ukraine’s eastern regions, in her capacity as Director of Humanitarian Initiatives of the Ukrainian World Congress, she started Patriot Defence, an organization that trains military and civilians in tactical medicine and has distributed NATO Standard Improved First Aid kits to more than 30,000 soldiers and medical personnel. On July 11, 2015, President Petro Poroshenko recognized Suprun’s work as being “in the state’s interest” and conferred citizenship to Ulana stating, “your efforts saved thousands of lives.”
