The first time that Renee Fay-LeBlanc, Portland High School, class of 1992, traveled on her own, she found herself in the Amazon jungle.

“It was a pretty formative experience for me,” she said. “It was the first time I was away from home by myself. It was the first time I had been to a developing country for a prolonged period of time. It was through that experience that I decided that I was going to try to go to medical school.”

Fay-LeBlanc indeed went to medical school. Today, she’s the chief medical officer for Greater Portland Health, a federally qualified health center in Portland, and an internal medicine doctor. She’s also the chair of the board of directors of Avesta Housing, an affordable housing nonprofit, a member of the Maine Board of Medical Licensure, and a board member at Maine Medical Center. The faculty and staff at PHS have chosen to present Fay-LeBlanc with the 2025 Distinguished Alumni Award in recognition of her service to the Portland community.

“My parents always volunteered when we were growing up,” she said of her work. “My dad was on a bunch of boards and doing good community work, and so I think I had that as a model. When you go to college, you sort of find what you know.”

In college, Fay-LeBlanc went on service trips to Appalachia and Mexico. She said that her experiences there helped her recognize how privileged she was and ultimately led her to the Amazon. She was encouraged to go there by a nun who had heard that Fay-LeBlanc was interested in traditional medicine.

“I didn’t even know where Guyana was,” Fay-LeBlanc said. The country had only recently opened up to the world, holding its first free and fair election in nearly three decades in 1992. Fay-LeBlanc took the nun’s advice, traveled to Guyana, and lived in an orphanage as she waited for her visa to enter the Amazon.

In Guyana, Fay-LeBlanc resided in a small village established by a religious mission, which included a small hospital offering Western medical care. She began vaccinating people and testing them for tuberculosis by traveling on boats up the Amazon to remote areas. On those journeys up the river, she would find local healers and talk to them. She learned that their traditional medicine practices were being lost.

“When I got to Guyana, all the elderly healers were either dead or dying,” she said. “Their tradition was very much an oral tradition that they would pass on to the next generation, but the next generation now had all this freedom and they wanted to leave their villages to do other things, to get connected to technology and all this stuff that had never been available.”

Fay-LeBlanc spent a year in Guyana, meeting people and learning as much information as possible to help preserve their traditional medicine knowledge.

“It sounds very amazing, the way that I tell it, but a lot of it was being bored and lonely in the jungle,” she laughed.

After returning from Guyana, Fay-LeBlanc moved to Oakland to be with her then-boyfriend (and now husband), Gibson. She stayed in Oakland for two years while her husband completed a graduate degree. She then attended medical school in Vermont and completed her residency in New York, during which time she and her husband had their first child.

“Looking back, I’m glad I was young,” she said of her grueling work schedule that was the norm at the time of her pregnancy. “You would be on call every third night, work for 36 hours, and then get about 12 hours off. It was very intense. It was a lot of time in the hospital. I’m not sure how I did it.”

Just six weeks after her son was born, she went back to work, maintaining the same grueling schedule. Living in a one-bedroom, third-story walk-up with an infant in New York pushed Fay-LeBlanc and her husband to move back to Maine after she finished residency. She has been back in Portland since 2006. She first worked for Maine Health in Cape Elizabeth, where she stayed for eight years before moving to Greater Portland Health.

“I made the switch because I wanted to do something that I felt was helping more of the vulnerable in our community,” she said. “My practice in Cape Elizabeth was wonderful, the people were wonderful, and all of them could find another doctor, but the work that I do now is for people who probably couldn’t get care if we weren’t here.”

She’s now been at Greater Portland Health for 11 years. She sees patients one and a half days a week in addition to working as chief medical officer. She and her husband have two sons, one a junior at PHS and the other a recent graduate. Even after her traveling around the country and around the world, she still had a connection to PHS when her sons started there.

“Dan Deniso had me in his first year of teaching, and he had my oldest son in his last year of teaching,” she said. “We are like the bookends of Dan Deniso’s career at Portland High School.”