Professor Emeritus, Dr. Don Pedersen has been involved with the Utah Physician Assistant Program (UPAP) since 1979, initially serving as Academic Coordinator. He was the Program Director from 1989 to 2010 after attaining a faculty appointment in the Department of Family and Preventive Medicine (DFPM) in the University of Utah School of Medicine. He, more recently, served as the Chief of the Division of Physician Assistant Studies and is now an Emeritus Professor and active internationally with his wife Kathy in a program they created, called Global Partners (GP). GP seeks to broker resources of the University of Utah to meet needs of multinational corporations and humanitarian organizations through education and clinical care.

Dr. Pedersen has served as the President of the Physician Assistant Foundation (PAF), the philanthropic arm of the American Academy of Physician Assistants (AAPA). He completed eight years of service on the PAF Board of Trustees and was awarded Emeritus Trustee status. Through the PAF, he and Kathy established an endowed grant program in honor of Don’s father to award international humanitarian outreach grants to PAs, PA Programs and PA students. To date nearly 50 grants have been awarded to assist in over 15 countries on 5 continents. While President of the PAF, he also raised $80,000 for Hurricane Katrina relief, which helped to rebuild a Community Health Center Clinic in Mississippi. He completed ten years on the State of Utah Physician Assistant Licensing Board at DOPL, serving two years as chair. He recently completed 6 years serving on the Board of Directors of the Health Foundation of the National Commission on Certification of PAs (NCCPA), where he established the Kathy J. Pedersen Grant program to Combat Health Disparities. In 1997 he helped pioneer the Utah PA Program’s international clinical activities starting in Papua New Guinea, Thailand and now Nepal. He served as a founding member on both the AAPA International Working Group and the PA Historical Society.