Lisa Oei, DPT ’05, MSPT, PT : Movement is Medicine

Keeping People with Parkinson’s Moving — and Living Fully

When someone is diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease, they often fear they’ll have to give up the activities they enjoy. Lisa Oei built her nonprofit around a different idea: that the right support, movement, and community can help people keep doing the things they love, often far longer than they expect. Oei is the founder and CEO of PD-Connect, a Bay Area nonprofit offering exercise, education, and community programs for people living with Parkinson’s.  

From Loss to a Calling

Oei was living in Hong Kong, working in sports marketing, when her father suddenly passed away. The loss reshaped her sense of purpose. “I decided that I didn’t want to just make a living,” she says, “I wanted to make a life.” In 2015, she returned to the Bay Area, enrolled at UCSF, and discovered her path through an unexpected phone call. Nancy Byl, BS ’63, PhD, MPH, then chair of the Physical Therapy department, asked if she’d help with a research project on Parkinson’s. “At the time, I didn’t know a lot about the disease,” Oei recalls, “but I said yes, got trained, and have never looked back.” That same year, she began working one-on-one with Parkinson’s patients and launched her first PD-Connect group class, expanding her reach to serve more people than she could through individual sessions. 

Making Life Bigger Again

With Parkinson’s, Oei explains, the default is small. “The patients’ world becomes small — their voice, their posture, their movements. At PD-Connect, we focus on doing everything big — big movements, big voice, big community.” That philosophy shows up vividly in programs like rock climbing, where participants who struggle to walk find something shifts when they get on the wall. “Something lights up in them,” Oei says, “and they walk away without the walker they used when they came in.” In community classes, held online and in person, participants newly diagnosed and those living with Parkinson’s for a decade come together to move, laugh, and encourage each other. “While science pursues a cure for tomorrow,” Oei says, “PD-Connect is helping people live fully today.”