Emmanuelle Oliveira

At six years old, Emmanuelle Oliveira was given 72 hours to live.

Following a misdiagnosis for a skin rash, Oliveira developed sepsis, a life-threatening complication that resulted from a highly contagious skin infection known as impetigo.

Isolated in a hospital room in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, the city where she lived, the doctors told her parents, “If she doesn’t respond to treatment, we might lose her.”

Oliveira survived, and from that moment, she knew she wanted to help others the way the medical staff had helped her.

“I told my dad when I left the hospital, ‘I want to be a doctor when I grow up because of what they did for me,’” she says.

In Oliveira’s pursuit of her career goal, she has overcome multiple hurdles.

When she was 13, she emigrated to Lowell with her family. She only spoke Portuguese but quickly mastered English through the help of her teachers.

Oliveira attended Lowell High School with her sights set on enrolling at UMass Lowell to study biological sciences. Her dream became a reality after she received the Tsongas Scholarship, which awarded her full tuition, fees and room and board.

“UMass Lowell was the only college I applied to,” she says. “I wouldn’t have been able to afford college at the time without that scholarship.”

Through UML’s dual enrollment program, Oliveira had already taken college biology and writing courses while in high school.

“It put me ahead of the game,” says Oliveira, who delved into some sophomore-level classes while a first-year student.

As Oliveira grew academically, so did her personal life. She got married in the summer before her sophomore year and had her first child about a year later.

“It was a little hard to go to school full time and have a child, but my family and professors were very supportive,” she says. “I remember taking an acting class to meet one of the arts and humanities requirements, and the professor was like, ‘Oh, just bring your newborn to class.’”

Oliveira graduated with a bachelor’s degree in biological sciences in 2010 and returned to UML the following academic year as a teaching assistant and a master’s student in biological sciences with a biotechnology option. During this time, she gained experience working in Biological Sciences Prof. Peter Gaines' lab.

Oliveira finished the master’s program in 2012 and applied to medical schools a year later. However, she soon learned that most medical schools would not accept her DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) status.

“I was upset, but I also believe everything happens for a reason,” she says. “I had two young kids and another on the way. I thought, ‘I’m just going to make the best of my time now and revisit this later on.’”

With the goal of becoming a doctor still in mind, Oliveira became a newborn hearing-screen technician at Lowell General Hospital, where she worked part time for 10 years. She also worked as a specimen processing technician for the New England Cord Blood Bank and has been with DPS, a Framingham-based project management and engineering company, for seven years as a commissioning, qualification and validation engineer at several client sites.

“Having done the master’s in biotech opened up this whole new door,” she says.

As more medical schools started accepting those with DACA status, Oliveira decided to reapply. She came back to UML as a teaching assistant in 2017 and retook some of the course prerequisites. She also worked with UMass Lowell’s Pre-Health Advising program to ensure she had a strong application.

“The pre-health advisors know what the schools are looking for and what the workload is to get there,” she says. “Having their support was amazing.”

Through perseverance, Oliveira, now a mother of four, is attending the University of New England College of Osteopathic Medicine. She plans to be an obstetrician-gynecologist due to her passion for the field and to help women with their preventative care (having lost her mother to ovarian cancer in 2021).

“It’s been a hard journey, but I think it was a good test because it showed me this is really what I wanted,” she says. “Getting to do what I love is the best gift.”