Cardinal Correctional Care Leadership Team

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Captain Stephen Ferrara served the nation for nearly 25 years as a physician and Naval officer. During numerous deployments with the Army, Navy, and Marine Corps, he served in austere locations from the Horn of Africa to Afghanistan and from tsunami-ravaged Indonesia to the South China Sea. After retiring from the Navy in 2016, he returned home to Arizona, where he won a competitive primary to be the Republican nominee to U.S. Congress (AZ-9) in 2018. He has dedicated his life to the service of his country and his fellow Americans. He remains active in national security, possessing the nation’s highest security clearance: TS-SCI, full-scope polygraph. 

Steve has been an active clinician caring for the nation’s Wounded Warriors at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center since 2014, where he currently serves as a full-time Professor of Radiology and Chief of Pediatric Interventional Radiology. Steve also served as the Deputy Chief for Clinical Operations for the National Capital Region Market. The NCR is the military’s largest and most complex Market, caring for ~500,000 beneficiaries and managing a budget in excess of $1.7B. 

As the Navy’s Chief Medical Officer and Director of Clinical Operations, Captain Ferrara led a complex global healthcare delivery system of 63,000 Navy medical department personnel caring for ~9.5 million active duty, dependents, and retirees around the world with an annual budget of nearly $50B. In this pivotal role, he chaired numerous initiatives directly reportable to the Secretary of Defense, Congress, and the President, demonstrating his exceptional leadership and ability to make a significant impact. 

Before becoming the Navy’s Chief Medical Officer, Captain Ferrara spent a year on Capitol Hill as a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation/National Academy of Medicine Congressional Health Policy Fellow. He was an integral staff member to the Health team of the Committee on Energy and Commerce (Majority), where his portfolio included FDA, public health matters, and health reform, although most of his expertise was devoted to formulating an overhaul policy to the flawed SGR physician payment formula. These efforts directly culminated in the replacement legislation recently passed in the 114th Congress (H.R.2: The Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act of 2015). 

In 2009, he served as a volunteer General Medical Officer in Kandahar, Afghanistan, where he introduced life-saving endovascular surgical techniques to the battlefield. This led to a paradigm shift in combat casualty care that saved innumerable lives and limbs in recent conflicts and will continue to do so in future wars. Captain Ferrara also identified a design defect in armored vehicles causing frequent paralyzing spine injuries. From the battlefield, he designed a blast-mitigating seat (the MRAP X-Box) to reduce the incidence of these devastating injuries and gave the design to the DoD, where it garnered $5 million in immediate funding and was fast-tracked for field implementation. 

An accomplished leader and educator, Ferrara was Chief of Interventional Radiology and residency program director at Naval Medical Center San Diego. He holds several academic appointments, lectures, and writes extensively on health policy and economics, humanitarian assistance, disaster relief, and combat casualty care. He is a renowned speaker, giving over 100 national and international lectures at meetings and institutions, including Harvard, Columbia, Stanford, Northwestern, Georgetown, and DARPA. 

Dr. Ferrara earned a B.S. in Molecular Biology at UCLA and completed his medical training in the Navy, UCSD, and Harvard. Captain Ferrara has numerous worldwide deployments, clinical and academic awards, and military awards, including the Legion of Merit, Defense Meritorious Service Medal,  Meritorious Service Medal, and Humanitarian Service Medal, in addition to numerous campaign awards.