Marie-Claire Walters, BA, is the Senior Coordinator of the National Living Donor Assistance Center (NLDAC), responsible for the operations of a federally funded program that provides reimbursement for travel, lost wages, and dependent care expenses to eligible living organ donors. It is the only program that provides financial assistance to living donors at all U.S. transplant centers.
After graduating from Clark University with a BA in Philosophy and Spanish, Marie-Claire taught English in the Chilean public school system for two years before joining NLDAC as a Program Assistant in 2017, when the program covered only travel expenses. Learning the program through a variety of positions, she was involved in early experiments to reimburse donors’ lost wages and developed the national lost-wage reimbursement system that launched in 2020. She has since helped steer the program through a period of extraordinary growth, with applications more than doubling while processing speed greatly improved.
She was nominated for The Alliance 40 Under 40 by Dr. Amit Mathur, Professor of Surgery at Mayo Clinic. “Ms. Walters is the heartbeat of this program, and in that regard, serves the transplant community in ways many cannot,” Mathur wrote, noting that roughly 20 percent of U.S. living donors use the program—most of whom would not have donated without it—and that she “truly makes the donation and transplant ecosystem a better place.”