By the time he was out of college, Eric Goralnick had more leadership training than a lot of people receive in a lifetime.
Goralnick, Secretary of Veterans Services since Feb. of 2026, attended the Naval Academy at Annapolis. And the academy exists to create leaders, specifically naval officers. Each academic year is devoted to a specific theme of personal growth, from self-discipline the first year to joint command of a 4,400 person brigade in the fourth.
Goralnick, whose father served three years in the Navy, learned about the service academies in high school and spent a week before his senior year in a program where “you could go to the Naval Academy and you could be a midshipman for a week and run around and talk about the Navy and see if you like it, and I fell in love with it.”
His parents are from Lowell and Winthrop, but moved to California in the early 1960s, and he grew up in Los Angeles. “So we used to come back here and visit my grandparents,” and he knew something of Massachusetts.
The Naval Academy and other military service academies aren’t just unique in their leadership training mission – “But it’s to develop leaders, you know, ‘Honor, Courage and Commitment,’ who are focused on career public service,” Goralnick said, “so many do end up going on to meaningful careers in some form or fashion or public service. Many of us get back in a variety of different ways because we feel it’s our duty and obligation.”
Goralnick’s call to serve comes from an even deeper place than love of country. “My Hebrew school teacher, Edith Singer, was a Holocaust survivor, and she was interned in Auschwitz. And she told us about her experience, and she told us about how America opened its doors for her and her family, and I knew at that point. I needed to serve.”
“Leadership laboratories” is how the Naval Academy phrases the experiences it provides its students. “Immediately you’re learning how to follow, how to lead…and as you’re progressing, you’re assuming greater leadership roles,” Goralnick said.
He trained to become master of the deck – the captain’s designee to be in charge of the ship – and after graduation rose to lieutenant and became a Surface Warfare officer – a demanding, high pressure post requiring excellent judgement, good decision making, and high-caliber leadership. He also noticed what the medical corpsmen did – he calls them the “Swiss Army knives” of medicine. “I got to see what they were doing, and that really opened up my eyes that I could potentially pursue a career in medicine. The idea of solely focusing on the preservation of others was inspiring, and so that became my mission.”
Returning to the States, he volunteered at the emergency department at the Navy Medical Center in San Diego, where a lieutenant commander allowed him to shadow him in the E.D., and clued him in on how to enter medicine.
Given the opportunity to do shore duty, Goralnick went to the Navy’s boot camp in North Chicago, and took pre-med classes at night and weekends. “Then I got out of the Navy, went to med school in Israel and then after going to med school in Israel, I came back and did my residency at Yale, and met my wife when I was an intern, and she’s from Massachusetts, so I knew this is where I was headed.”
Goralnick’s resume is deep, and deeply impressive: Naval Academy, medical degree from the University of Tel Aviv, residency at Yale, Master’s of Public Health from Harvard. Emergency physician and clinical director of the Brigham and Women’s Hospital Emergency Department. Chair of the Disaster Medicine Section of the American College of Emergency Physicians. A hundred published papers on emergency medicine and resiliency in health-care delivery. Medical director, Gillette Stadium.
There’s a good deal more, but the last item on his resume above all made him an optimal choice early this year, after former Secretary Jon Santiago departed to return to the practice of emergency medicine at Boston Medical Center – having brought the department out of the nightmarish repercussions of the state soldiers’ homes COVID disaster.
Goralnick was founding director of military and veterans initiatives at Mass. General Brigham, a center whose three core missions – advancing battlefield medicine, improving medical and emergency education in the defense sector, and bringing vets into the medical workforce – reflect a convergence of his greatest professional strengths and interests.
That convergence of interests aligns with where he wants to take the secretariat post-soldiers’ homes catastrophe. Three great strengths of the Massachusetts economy – education, health care, and medical research – match up with his own professional strong points and experience, and he’s out to leverage them for the benefit of the veterans community.
“If you’re looking for people who have grit, who are more diverse than non veterans, who have early leadership opportunities, can understand and handle complex situations with limited information, and again, are focused on service, healthcare is a perfect match,” Goralnick said. And the Mass. healthcare sector is notoriously short of workers.
In the medical education sphere, “I personally, you know, worked closely with pre-med students, medical school students, school of public health students, to help them on their trajectory in their career, and that’s really one of the most rewarding things I’ve been able to support, right, is to really help these young motivated individuals find the place that they want to go. And you know, give them a little water and let them grow, right?” The MGB initiative he founded enabled him to scale this undertaking. Now he has the opportunity to steer promising medical talent in the state’s veteran corps into the research hospitals that abound here.
At some of those same institutions, Goralnick was enmeshed in the effort to improve emergency medicine – including advancement of the Stop the Bleed education initiative out of his horrific experience as a medical director at the 2013 Boston Marathon. Battlefield medicine is, of course, emergency medicine, and Massachusetts’ medical researchers are on the leading edge of extending its capabilities in the 21st century and filling what Goralnick calls “capability gaps.” Washington politics aside, copious research funding opportunities await – and this component snaps in well to the governor’s SHIELD initiative, intentionally built to make state government a driver of jobs and profits by bolstering research, innovation and manufacturing within the defense industry.
A unique real-world example: Gornalick is part of the effort to smooth the Walker Dip, where battlefield survival rates diminish in peacetime, when military emergency medical personnel get no exposure to combat. The solution: offer their services to urban emergency departments, where inevitably they get opportunities to sharpen their response skills.
Having spent 30 years training to lead, practicing the arts of personal mentorship and public education, teaching classes, developing talent, he’s a bit hard-pressed to select a couple of his own mentors, because the possibilities are so numerous.
“I’ve had the benefit of many individuals who have helped me, and I think that’s one of my cornerstones in life, is I’ve got to pay it forward, and everyone that I mentor, I ask them to pay it forward,” he said.
He did cite a couple of specific people: Thomas Lee, now chief medical officer at the patient-experience improvement firm Press Ganey, whom Garolnick met when Lee gave a talk on leadership in medicine at the Harvard school of public health. “Tom early on really taught me about authenticity. Here’s what he did: I introduced myself, and said I’m a Naval Academy grad, an emergency physician, and I’m really interested in this topic, and I think it’s so important that we develop leaders, and I want to reach out.
“So, I went to his office, met with him, and he reintroduces himself, and pulls out a notebook.” Lee clicked his pen “and told me, ‘Tell me about your parents,'” and he – for 40-50 minutes, almost an hour, question after question about my history. ‘Where’d you grow up? Where’d you learn this or that?’ And at the end of an hour, he said, ‘The reason I did this is because I see this as the beginning of an important relationship and an investment,’ and that has set the tone for me. And that’s what I do with every one of my mentees.
Goralnick broke off his story to ask his communications director, Maryalice Curley, “What’s the first question I asked you when you sat in this room?” She replied, “About my family, where I’m from,” and “That’s Tom Lee,” Goralnick said.
Ron Walls, COO of Brigham Women’s and former chair of the emergency department, “has been a great mentor of mine,” Goralick said. “He really helped my career come to life in the sense of thinking through – encouraging me and allowing me to fail, right? Allowing me to test, try different things. I worked in various roles in administration and research, and providing the support needed to allow me to fail and learn from that and grow.” For instance, Walls was patient with Goralnick as he tried implementing a new patient-transfer system within Brigham and Women’s and it did not go as he’d hoped. “Jjust the patient mentorship of working through that, encouraging me, you know, allowing me to try different things, so that I could I could learn from – You know, 90% of the time we’re failing, actually, right? Most of the time we’re trying something that doesn’t work. So: what did you learn? Let’s try something a little bit different, etc. So that was important.”
The day came when Santiago called, and let Goralinick know he was moving on. Operating at the highest level of the health industry, trying to fix its woes and address the needs of the veterans with whom he has such affinity, what caused Goralnick to take what some might consider a step down, go through the vetting process and accept the job and the difficulties of the public sector?
“Well, I think it’s a remarkable opportunity to do some good. My DNA is service. And so the idea of being able to work as a public servant, to help lead and empower a team that’s focused on improving the lives of veterans in the Commonwealth – it’s a dream.”
What’s surprised him most about the reality of public sector management? “I think you know, working as a clinician, working as a scientist, working with the Navy, there are a lot of stakeholders – but here in public service, there are more,” he said with a smile.
You have to consider all the various stakeholders and how we can best support them, right? And understand their needs, and sort of best support them to, you know, achieve the best outcome and impact for, for ultimately our veterans.”
The EOVS runs 17 programs with a budget of $205 million. In addition to administering the state veterans- benefits programs, the secretariat coordinates 20 non-profits that provide services from health care to housing to mental health, and assists the 351 veterans service officers – one in every city and town. Goralnick had a goal of visiting 90 percent of the VSOs in 90 days, got to 80 percent, and will keep on going. “I’m really trying hard to get out there, listen, learn, and then team up on solutions,” he said.
Another bucket of oversight is the state veterans’ cemeteries in Winchendon and Agawam.
And of course, the secretary is effectively the CEO of two skilled nursing facilities as well – the soldiers’ homes in Chelsea and Holyoke. Sanitago led the department through the recovery and reform phase after the COVID disaster, and the elevation of the agency to cabinet-level status.
“Now we have to move from revolution to evolution, to become a high-reliability organization that’s providing best-in-class care and services for our veterans in the Commonwealth, and to lead the nation in this work. That’s the next evolution,” the secretary said.
To that end, Goralnick’s main point of emphasis now is creation of a three-year strategic plan, building on a comprehensive study of the state’s veterans community by the RAND corporation. He says to look for it at the beginning of 2027, around his one-year anniversary.
“Our objective is to have a very clear strategic map, you know, our mission, vision, values; our priority areas that we’re working on; and our key performance indicators. That’s how we’re going to measure the effectiveness and impact of these programs.”
“I’m learning so much,” he concluded. “You know, obviously about the content, the programs, deliverables. But it’s a remarkable journey to go on as a citizen, to learn about your government and how it works. What’s working, where the challenges are – and the people, and the commitment and dedication of the people that I’m surrounded by is incredibly inspiring. There’s a lot of work to do, but it’s meaningful work and it’s the right work and I’m really optimistic about where we are and where we’re going.”
== Craig Sandler, Mass. Almanac/SHNS