Victoria Wells Wulsin

Victoria Elizabeth Wells Wulsin (born October 27, 1953) is a physician working on stopping the spread of AIDS in Kenya and is a Democratic candidate for Congress in the Second District of Ohio (map) in the 2006 election. She announced April 16, 2007, she will be a candidate for the Second district in 2008. She is a resident of Indian Hill, a suburb of Cincinnati.

Wulsin was born in Elyria, Ohio, the daughter of a teacher and a social worker. She attended high school in Ohio and earned a scholarship to Harvard University, where she did her undergraduate coursework. After college, she returned to Ohio and earned a medical degree from Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland on May 28, 1980. She later received her masters and doctorate degrees in Public Health at Harvard University. Wulsin received her medical license in Ohio on March 7, 1989. Her husband, Lawson Reed Wulsin, is a psychiatrist.

In April 2003, Wulsin founded a non-profit organization to fight AIDS in Africa, SOTENI International &mdash;the name is a Swahili word for "all of us together" and an acronym for Sustainability, Opportunity, Training, Epidemiology, Networking, and Interdependence&mdash;which has its headquarters in Cincinnati and an office in Kenya. SOTENI has been "mainly aimed towards women and orphans who were most affected by the AIDS pandemic." 

Wulsin was hired by the Heimlich Institute to analyze data on AIDS patients with malaria. In December 2004, when she presented a draft report that proposed significant upgrades in safeguards, oversight, and accountability before moving forward, and cautioned against further unsupervised experiments in Africa, she was fired.

Politics
Wulsin has not held elected office.

2005 special election for Congress
Wulsin was a candidate for the Democratic nomination for Congress to replace Rob Portman in the Second District of Ohio in the special primary held June 14, 2005. In the Democratic primary, Wulsin campaigned to reform health care to provide every citizen with coverage, promised to protect Social Security and the environment, said the Iraq War "has not been worth the cost of American service personnel or the dollars we have spent", and said America needed "fair trade" in the proposed CAFTA agreement. She also defended contraception, legal abortion and reproductive rights.

In the primary election, Wulsin finished second behind Paul Hackett. She received 3,800 votes (27.35%).

2006 election for Congress
In 2006, Wulsin sought the Democratic nomination again. With Paul Hackett having announced he would not run again, she faced health care administrator James John Parker and civil engineer Jeff Sinnard, who both ran in 2005, and newcomers Gabrielle Downey, a high school teacher, and Thor Jacobs, a building contractor. Wulsin won the May 2 primary by nearly 15 percentage points and received the Democratic nomination for the 2nd District. She faced Rep. Jean Schmidt (R) in the November 2006 general election and was defeated by only 2,517 votes. Wulsin carried Pike County and Scioto County by wide margins and narrowly carried Brown County. She also defeated Schmidt in Hamilton County, where the largest population in the district exists and that Schmidt had won during her special election victory against Hackett, but Schmidt widely carried the rest of the district, leading to her narrow victory. This is the closest that a Democrat has come to winning a full term in the heavily Republican 2nd District in over 40 years.