Dr. Andrea Parodi has a quite different health professional background compared to others. She first started her journey with a Bachelors’ in Clinical Psychology with minors of Theology, Sociology and Philosophy. Then she went back to school to receive a Bachelors’ degree in Nursing. After graduating, she became a burn specialist nurse to where she then transferred to clinical care specialist as well. Dr. Parodi then went on to receive a Masters in Critical Care Trauma. At this time, she was teaching other nurse majors at her university as a side job. On a special trip to Florida, she then swore into the Navy as a Navy Head Nurse where she also taught her students that swore in at the same time as her. Luckily for her, the Navy wanted her to continue her education to the point where she received two degrees out of it. She earned her Doctorate in Higher Education Leadership and a Phd. in Healthcare Policy to where the Phd. benefitted her most of her future career. Dr. Parodi then retired as a Navy commander in 2011 to move on to work at Old Dominion University’s VMASC program. Her job at VMASC was to redesign the healthcare system of that program so the employees were in better care, then ten years later, she retired from VMASC in July of 2020. As of right now, she is working for NASA  as a nursing and healthcare researcher and convention speaker. D. Parodi helps with designing new medical equipment for faster and safer recovery of patients.

 From her interview, she described her experiences from a philosophical and caring way where she is a brilliant woman. What motivated her to move into the field of healthcare was how diverse the support was. “You get to help from premature babies to hospice care and this shows how supportive we are as human beings,” said by Dr. Parodi. The basic roles she described were to support the physician and individual in any way possible that is professional and appropriate. Her favorite aspect of the healthcare journey was design. She designs now at NASA and she designed healthcare systems and machines for the military. Dr. Parodi believed designing is a creative outlet in life while helping others. The most surprising thing she found was that she found herself in engineering machines to help save lives in extreme cases while still exercising her nursing skills. The most challenging part was not achieving her goal, she claimed she was a perfectionist and her goal was to help as many people as possible. Dr. Parodi’s advice she gave to me was to keep your mind open. She had experienced counts of sexism, racism, and agism where she decided to not let those things affect her job and to help everyone that crossed her path. No matter what, people are people and everyone is the same underneath. Another piece of advice was that the healthcare field is very selfless and you don’t know when you will need to drop everything to save someone. 

Overall, I have had the pleasure of interviewing this extraordinary person and her journey. Dr. Parodi has achieved above beyond the normal person where she still dedicates her time into research, speaking and designing new attributes to the healthcare field.