LEWISTON — A LifeFlight of Maine nurse was recently awarded a nine-month Fulbright Scholarship in Finland to collaborate with regional educators and help improve rural medical education.

Brad Boehringer, a flight nurse based with the helicopter at Central Maine Medical Center, has been a pre-hospital provider for 16 years. He spent time teaching for SOLO, a wilderness medicine school based in Conway, N.H., and there developed his passion for education and continued clinical experiences. This led him to a degree in nursing and eventually to positions in the emergency departments at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston and Maine Medical Center in Portland. He joined the LifeFlight team in 2011 and recently completed his master’s degree in nursing education from Drexel University in Philadelphia.

In Finland, Boehringer will collaborate with Laurea University of Applied Sciences to establish and implement a mobile nursing simulation center for rural areas of Finland.

His ongoing passion for outdoor expeditions and international travel has led him to hike the Appalachian Trail, work for the Hurricane Outward Bound School in Maine, volunteer at a clinic in the Dominican Republic and even guide high-altitude expeditions through Field Touring Alpine in Nepal, Ecuador and around the world.

Boehringer will be joined by his wife Katherine Scott, to whom he was recently married.