Dr. Michael Villarroel, D.O.

Dr. Michael Villarroel is a U.S. Navy Commander, a combat-decorated physician, and a director of the Justice Restoration Foundation whose career has been spent at the sharpest edges of military medicine.

He earned his Doctor of Osteopathic Medicine at Des Moines University in 2004 and completed an internal medicine residency at Naval Medical Center San Diego, practicing family and internal medicine. Across nearly two decades of naval service he served almost entirely with special-operations and expeditionary forces — as medical department head for the 1st Reconnaissance Battalion, as dive medical officer at the Naval Special Warfare Center overseeing care during Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL (BUD/S) training, as senior medical director for the 1st Marine Raider Battalion, and finally as medical director for Explosive Ordnance Disposal Group One, where he built and launched the command's first Warfighter Resiliency Program. Between deployments he also practiced urgent and primary care in San Diego.

It was on deployment to Al Anbar Province, Iraq, that he earned the Bronze Star. Faced with a critically ill seven-month-old and only a stethoscope, he climbed onto a rooftop and lay flat under the threat of sniper fire to get a signal on a satellite phone, reaching the one pediatrician he knew — his wife, also a Navy physician — who helped him find the diagnosis. He and his colleagues then flew the child by helicopter to Baghdad for surgery, and the baby was home within a week.

As a director of the Foundation, Villarroel brings clinical and professional perspective to its research, documentation, and public-education programming on what federal prosecution does to licensed professionals — a population that can lose a license, a practice, and a career on a timeline entirely disconnected from any adjudication, and rarely gets any of it back.