Medea Valdez has built two PA programs from nothing and led one of them through initial and continuing accreditation. From 2017 to 2024 she was Director of the Master of Science in Physician Assistant program at Saint Elizabeth University, where she developed the program and its forty-two-course curriculum, and served concurrently as Assistant Professor and, for a year, Interim Chair of the STEM department. Before that she was Executive Director of the School of Physician Assistant Studies at Kean University from 2014 to 2017, where she developed that program's thirty-six-course curriculum, its mission and goals, and its full accreditation documentation.
Her fourteen years at Weill Cornell Graduate School of Medical Sciences are where the clinical-year expertise comes from. She served as Senior Clinical Coordinator from 2000 to 2014 and Associate Director from 2009 to 2014, responsible for the clinical curriculum, site procurement and preceptor development, student performance monitoring and remediation, and preparation for ARC-PA site visits. Her career in PA education began in 1995 at the Brooklyn Hospital Center and Long Island University program, the same program she graduated from, where she rose from Clinical Coordinator to Associate Director.
She holds a Doctor of Health Education from A.T. Still University, where she earned the Certificate of Academic Excellence for the highest GPA in the doctoral program, and a Master of Physician Assistant Studies from Oregon Health and Science University. She has been certified by the National Commission on Certification of Physician Assistants since 1990 and is a Fellow of the American Academy of Physician Assistants and of the New Jersey and New York state societies. She was named to the NJ Biz Education Power 50 in 2019 and received the Taylor-Moses Institute Leadership in Medicine Award in 2024.
Medea joined Massey & Associates Consulting Solutions in 2024 and became Lead Consultant in 2026. She leads accreditation engagements spanning initial and continuing applications, self-study development, and monitoring responses, and supervises consultant teams across the firm's portfolio. Her research includes a co-authored study with Scott Massey on the predictive strength of PA-CAT scores against first-semester performance, work that sits directly alongside the analytics MACS builds its self-assessment guidance on.