Steve Ferrara, MD, FSIR, FACR is the Deputy Director for Clinical Operations and the Chief of Clinical Optimization for the DoD’s National Capital Region Market, which encompasses several hospitals, including the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center. Steve is an actively practicing Interventional Radiologist at Walter Reed and a Clinical Professor of Radiology and Radiological Sciences at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences.
Steve Ferrara has a lengthy and distinguished military background. He served for 25 years in the Navy achieving the rank of Captain and rising to the position of Chief Medical Officer, helping oversee a world-class health system of 63,000 healthcare professionals. During his career, he deployed multiple times with the Army, Navy, and Marine Corps and served in combat environments as well as humanitarian assistance and disaster relief settings. In his current role, Steve continues caring for service members and their families as part of the Military Health System, a worldwide, integrated healthcare system that provides for over 9 million military beneficiaries while responding to crisis operations around the globe.
While serving as a Battalion Surgeon in Kandahar, Afghanistan, Steve Ferrara volunteered at the NATO Role 3 Multinational Medical Unit, Afghanistan’s busiest trauma and casualty facility. There he introduced life- and limb-saving endovascular surgical techniques to the battlefield for the first time, changing the paradigm for U.S. combat casualty care. Steve has supported multiple humanitarian relief efforts such as 2004 tsunami relief in Aceh, Indonesia, earthquake recovery in Nias Island, and MEDCAPs in Papua New Guinea, East Timor, and the Horn of Africa.
Steve Ferrara’s military and medical expertise led to his invitation as a U.S. representative to a joint initiative between American and Vietnamese health care providers commemorating the 20th anniversary of normalization of relations between the two nations. This effort to share knowledge and build rapport with the government of Vietnam was one of several successful Subject Matter Expert Exchanges (SMEE) in recent years.
Throughout his impressive career, Steve has been honored with numerous military and medical accolades and awards. He is the recipient of the Legion of Merit, the Defense Meritorious Service Medal and numerous other personal and campaign awards. He has held senior civilian and academic leadership positions from both specialty societies and healthcare organizations. Despite all of his talent and success, one of Steve’s most notable qualities is his genuine compassion for others, a trait that he has repeatedly demonstrated through all of his personal and professional endeavors.
One thing that Steve Ferrara is passionate about is working towards making affordable healthcare accessible for all Americans. One of the ways he’s working to achieve this is being a part of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation/National Academy of Medicine Congressional Fellowship. He currently serves in the 113th Congress, where he played a huge role in creating legislation that focuses on prioritizing accessible healthcare to Americans by changing the healthcare payment system. When this legislation was presented to the Health Subcommittee, it passed unanimously (51-0), thanks to Steves’s incredible collaborative skills and bipartisanship.
Not only is Steve Ferrara an incredible politician, but he is also a nationally-recognized speaker and writer on a number of topics. These topics include things such as vascular and interventional radiology, healthcare policy, and economics. Not only that, but he also writes a number of pieces that he’s incredibly passionate about, including civil rights, social justice, disaster and humanitarian relief, poverty alleviation, and human rights.
Steve received his B.S. in Molecular Biology at UCLA before obtaining his training to become a pediatric interventional radiologist in the Navy, at the University of California, San Diego, and Harvard Medical School’s Boston Children’s Hospital.
Find out more about Steve Ferrara at steveferrara.net.
