After being stranded by a typhoon in an isolated region of Sub-Saharan Africa, Amy Lehman was driven to provide health care for the communities there by creating the Lake Tanganyika Floating Health Care Clinic/Water-based Aid, Value, Engagement. Lehman earned both an MD and an MBA from the University of Chicago in 2005 and went on to a residency at the University of Chicago Hospitals and a senior fellowship at the MacLean Center for Medical Ethics. Shipwrecked by a typhoon while on vacation on Lake Tanganyika, the longest freshwater lake in the world, she saw how the local communities were cut off from vital medical services. In 2008 she created LTFHC/WAVE, an organization now working to create a floating hospital and research center on Lake Tanganyika that will improve public health and promote environmentally responsible development in the four countries surrounding the lake: the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Tanzania, Burundi, and Zambia.

Amy Lehman is a grantee of the Jewish Women’s Foundation of New York (JWFNY), and is featured as part of a partnership between JWA and JWFNY spotlighting Jewish women social entrepreneurs.