News Archives: Dr. Marie Moreau, Oncologist
Wednesday, December 3rd, 2014
Following grade 12 at St. Thomas More Catholic School in Fairview, where she was class valedictorian, Moreau completed two years of pre-medicine at GPRC. In her second year, she served as treasurer of the Students’ Association and was honoured as recipient of the GPRC Valedictorian Award. She spent the next four years in Edmonton and received her medical degree from the University of Alberta (U of A).
Following medical school, she headed to Regina where she interned for one year at the Grey Nuns (Pasqua) Hospital. With her feet firmly planted on the ground working in the medical field, she decided to take to the air to attain her private pilots’ license – one of the items on her bucket list. A surgeon at the hospital was a flight instructor, so the timing was right to take on this new challenge.
Completing her year in Regina, Moreau once again packed her bags, this time heading a little closer to home to the small city of Lloydminster, where she would spend the next few years working as a general practitioner. Throughout those two years, she made plans for a six-month medical missionary trip to Lesotho, Africa. While the trip was an incredible cultural experience, she says she also learned a lot about herself and made some important decisions about the area of medicine in which she wanted to practice.
During her residency, Moreau asked for a rural placement for one of her electives. She was sent to Grande Prairie and says the month she spent working alongside Dr. Claudia Strehlke confirmed that this was the community she needed to be in. Grande Prairie was a small and friendly city, yet large enough to have the diagnostic backup required for her specialty.
Today, Moreau is an oncologist at the Queen Elizabeth II Hospital and serves as the Medical Director of the Grande Prairie Cancer Centre and the Medical Director of the Pulmonary Function Lab.
“I went into medicine because I knew I wanted to help people,” she says. “Medicine has been hard work, but it’s always interesting, never dull. It keeps me thinking, and I love to think.”
