Dr. Sheila Salinas Navarro has spent most of her life translating. Not just words between Spanish and English, though she has done plenty of that, but something more intricate: translating between worlds that operate on different assumptions, serve different populations, and speak in vocabularies that rarely overlap. Her work exists in the spaces where academic research meets lived experience, where technology encounters the realities of aging immigrants, where theory must become practice or else remain merely decorative.
She grew up as a bridge. The daughter of Spanish-speaking parents, she found herself interpreting at parent-teacher conferences when she was still a child herself, navigating the bureaucracies of doctor's offices, negotiating the small daily interactions with neighbors that required someone who could move fluidly between languages and the cultural logics embedded within them. It was an education in systems, in who they are built for and who they leave behind, in the demanding work of constant translation that falls to children who happen to speak the dominant language.
This early apprenticeship in advocacy shaped everything that followed. When she entered higher education, she was drawn to supporting first-generation Latino students, recognizing in their struggles the barriers her own family had encountered. Academic spaces that appeared accessible and fair from the outside revealed themselves, upon closer examination, to be full of unwritten rules, unstated expectations, and cultural codes that favored those who had grown up fluent in them. She became a guide, someone who could make visible what had been designed to remain invisible.
But caregiving remained the constant. It was both her inheritance and her chosen work, a role she inhabited long before she had professional credentials to attach to it. The nature of care, she learned, is that it does not wait for you to be ready. It simply arrives and asks what you will do.
The pivot came through contrast. She found herself caring for a 96-year-old woman, affluent, healthy, independent, surrounded by supports that made aging appear almost graceful. The woman's experience of growing old bore little resemblance to what she witnessed in her own community, where older adults who had spent decades in factories and blue-collar jobs aged into bodies that had been used hard, that carried the accumulated toll of physical labor, that lacked the cushion of wealth and wellness infrastructure. The distance between these two modes of aging was not simply about individual choices or health behaviors. It was structural, embedded in the architecture of who receives what quality of care in their final decades.
This recognition led her to the University of Southern California, where she pursued a PhD in Gerontology with questions about how immigrant communities age and how structural inequities inscribe themselves into the body over time. But the research evolved as she worked. She became increasingly interested in technology, in how older adults engage with digital tools, and more pressingly, in who does not engage with them and why. The digital divide, she discovered, was not a simple matter of access to devices. It involved language, trust, training, histories of exclusion, and systems designed without certain populations in mind.
Her path to this work was not linear. She holds a bachelor's degree in Business Administration, a master's in Public Administration, and a PhD in Gerontology, three credentials that might appear unrelated in a conventional academic narrative. But she does not see them as disconnected. Each program equipped her with skills she continues to use, often in ways she could not have predicted at the time. The business training taught her about systems and sustainability. The public administration degree deepened her understanding of policy and implementation. The gerontology research gave her the methodological tools to study the questions that had been forming since childhood.
She tells students that the trajectory is rarely straight, and that deviation is not failure. Work experiences and volunteer roles shape who you become, even when they seem tangential to your eventual destination. What matters is persistence, the discipline to continue when the path feels unclear, to show up semester after semester, to trust that the skills accumulate even when their purpose is not yet apparent. Grades matter, she acknowledges, but they do not define worth or potential. Finishing is often the greatest achievement.
Her research now sits at the intersection of caregiving, aging, immigration, and technology. It is grounded in lived experience, which gives her a particular kind of authority in research spaces. As a first-generation Latina, she can speak from a position that mirrors the realities of many Spanish-speaking participants who navigate systems not built for them. This is both privilege and responsibility. She recognizes challenges that are frequently overlooked or misunderstood by those who come from different circumstances, who learned about healthcare and aging through different lived experiences.
The gaps she identified among Spanish-speaking older adults in the digital landscape clarified her purpose. These disparities were not minor inconveniences but fundamental exclusions from systems increasingly necessary for accessing healthcare, social services, and community connection. Her presence in research, she came to understand, was not incidental. It was necessary, not because she possessed any special gifts, but because the questions that matter to her community require researchers who understand those questions from the inside.
Her work is designed to move beyond theory. She engages in implementation science, translating evidence into applied, community-informed action. The research happens in real-world settings because that is where it must ultimately matter. She defines outcomes through the lens of the communities served rather than through assumptions or stereotypes imposed from outside. This centering of community voices ensures that findings are relevant, respectful, responsive.
She understands her responsibility as extending beyond data collection and publication. Research, in her practice, becomes a form of service, a tool for supporting patients, improving systems of care, contributing to equitable health outcomes. It is an academic endeavor, certainly, but it is also something more fundamental: a way of insisting that certain lives and experiences be taken seriously, be studied carefully, be understood on their own terms.
Alongside her academic work, she serves as a philanthropic coordinator and entrepreneur, working to expand access to funding, training, and resources for small businesses and community-based organizations. She is particularly focused on creating pathways in industries where women, especially women of color, remain underrepresented. The work is about economic mobility, leadership development, ensuring that individuals and families are empowered to thrive and age with dignity.
When she thinks about the future of healthcare, she imagines a system that actively dismantles stereotypes rooted in racism and narratives that position certain communities as less capable or less deserving of quality care. Redefining these stories is essential to building healthcare grounded in dignity and equity rather than in assumptions about who matters and who can be overlooked.
She also thinks about technology and artificial intelligence, tools that could either deepen existing disparities or expand access to underserved populations. When implemented thoughtfully, technology can reduce barriers related to geography, language, mobility, cost. It can bring healthcare closer to the communities that need it most. But thoughtfulness requires intention, requires asking who is centered in the design, who is consulted, who benefits, who is left behind.
The next generation, she believes, has a critical role. They can center equity in their training, question biased systems, engage with communities as partners rather than subjects, use technology as a bridge rather than a gatekeeper. They can help reshape healthcare into something more inclusive, more just, more responsive to the full scope of human experience.
Dr. Salinas Navarro has been translating her entire life. Between languages, between worlds, between research and practice, between the realities she grew up with and the systems she now works within and hopes to change. The work of translation is never finished. There is always another conversation that needs interpreting, another gap that needs bridging, another community whose experience has been rendered invisible by systems that were not designed to see them. She continues the work because it is necessary, because she knows intimately what happens when no one is there to translate, because she understands that her presence in these spaces is not simply about her own achievement but about opening doors that have been closed to too many for too long.
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