Changemakers in Family Planning: Samantha Truong
Abortion and contraception
Awarded 2025
Changemakers in Family Planning
Samantha Truong, MD
Boston University
$84,000

Samantha Truong, MD (she/her/ella) is an Assistant Professor at Boston University Chobanian and Avedisian School of Medicine and an academic generalist in the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology at Boston Medical Center (BMC), who is devoted to compassionate and equitable care for marginalized populations, particularly forcibly displaced migrant communities. She completed her medical training at Harvard Medical School and her OBGYN residency through Mass General Brigham with a focus on reproductive justice and migrant health. Dr. Truong’s commitment to social justice and health equity centered on migrant and refugee patients derives from her lived experience as the daughter of Vietnamese refugees. As a practicing OBGYN at BMC’s interdisciplinary Refugee Women’s Health Clinic, Dr. Truong offers full-spectrum sexual and reproductive health care to newly arrived migrants, refugees, and asylum-seekers. Working in a large urban safety-net system serving patients from over 20 different countries, she carries firsthand the detrimental impacts of restrictive abortion and harmful immigration policies. She performs asylum evaluations for survivors of sexual and gender-based violence through the Physicians for Human Rights Asylum Network. She also collaborates with the Refugee Health Alliance to provide reproductive health services at the US-Mexico border. These experiences drive Dr. Truong’s focus on addressing the profound detrimental impacts of forced displacement, harmful immigration policies, and abortion restrictions on reproductive access for the migrant community. Her research strives to center patients at the margins of racial, linguistic, and reproductive justice work, using a mixed-methods, community-engaged approach to reduce inequities in migrant/refugee reproductive health and abortion access.