CHICAGO — Alyssa Smaldino, the daughter of Tony and Karen Smaldino of Butler, can give her overstuffed passport a rest.

After four years of traveling the globe on behalf of GlobeMed, the Evanston, Ill.-based nonprofit that matches college students with grassroots health groups in the developing world, the organization made her its executive director in May.

She learned the news, Smaldino said, after “I had gotten back in May from Uganda from a conference held with our African partner organizations there.”

Smaldino began working for GlobeMed in July 2011, soon after she graduated from Washington, D.C.’s George Washington University with a bachelor’s degree in public health.

Founded by students in 2007, the GlobeMed network engages more than 2,000 college students at 55 university chapters in the United States.

According to GlobeMed, each chapter is partnered with a grassroots health organization in one of 18 countries throughout Africa, Asia and Latin America.

“Since 2011, I had been director of partnerships,” she said. “What that means is I find and support our partners abroad. My job was to recruit new partners and develop training for the students who volunteer with us.”

Smaldino estimated she had been to 18 countries since she signed on with GlobeMed.

Although she figures there are 31 countries stamped in her passport because she was an exchange student in Italy when she was at Shady Side Academy.

“When I was at George Washington, I studied abroad in Denmark. Part of my program took me to Estonia, Finland and Sweden,” she said. “I visited the UK and the Netherlands.”

All the entry and exit stamps had an effect on her passport.

Smaldino said, “I had pages added to it last year, so I have a really thick one now.”

But now that she will be leading the nonprofit in terms of strategy, fundraising and publicity, she said her future trips will likely be to unexotic locations such as New York and Washington, D.C., instead of Rwanda or Nepal.

“It is not quite as much fun,” she said.

But that’s fine with her mother, Karen Smaldino.

“Her father and I definitely worried in the beginning. It was very scary for us,” said Karen Smaldino.

“But she’s just a very smart, confident young adult, so I think that gives us more comfort and confidence in what she’s doing.”

“She’s made such an impact on people’s lives,” Karen Smaldino said.

“She will have such amazing lifelong stories,” her mother said.

Smaldino said she was the executive board of the GlobeMed chapter at George Washington as a student, and the summer after graduation she traveled to Rwanda.

“Our partner organization was the Rwanda Village Concepts Project, and they were doing a women’s health program that also involved income generation through agriculture.”

“We were trying to cut childhood malnutrition,” she said. “In Rwanda, a lot of the mothers are widows after the genocide. They only have an elementary education, and the little income they earn means they don’t have the means to feed their child diverse types of food.”

In her travels, she said, “I really liked Peru as a country. I didn’t get to go to Machu Picchu, but I went to a different mountain town and the Amazon. The food is really amazing in Peru also.”

“The only kind of sickness I had was in Thailand after I had just spent four weeks in Egypt,” she said. “I love spicy foods and in Thailand I overdid it a little bit, gave myself an ulcer in my esophagus. It was really hard just to swallow water.”

But she hasn’t put away her passport yet.

She said, “Traveling is going to be holidays. Argentina is high on my list, I want to go back to Italy, my family is Italian and I’ve been to Italy two times now.” And she plans to be back in Butler County for the holidays.

Go to GlobeMed.org to learn more or contribute to the organization.