Robert F. Kennedy, during a campaign speech for the presidency of the United States once said, "Tragedy is a tool for the living to gain wisdom, not a guide by which to live." The painful experience of being an eyewitness, a victim, and a survivor of the disastrous leakage of poisonous methyl iso-cyanate gas on December 3, 1984 in Bhopal, India, made Dr. Ujwala Pagedar understand these words. Since then, she has tried to change her despondency into a strong commitment to help alleviate pain and suffering. Ten years later, she entered the same medical college where she was once treated as a victim, as a medical student, at age 18. After completing her internal medicine residency training at Wright State University, Dayton, Ohio in 2007, Dr. Pagedar moved to Columbus and did some work in urban settings. In 2011, she started work in Mansfield, Ohio, in a federally qualified health center, which was a modified Victorian house operating as a clinic. By 2019, it became the largest primary care group in Richland County, Ohio, with 11 satellite offices holding PCMH and Joint Commission certifications. Dr. Pagedar loved her patients and was voted one of Mid Ohio's Best Physicians in a reader's choice poll and Community Health Center Hero by the Ohio Association of Community Health Centers in 2015.

She loves academic pursuits, including teaching, and is currently the clinical assistant professor of medicine at Northeast Ohio Medical University in Rootstown, Ohio. Like Forest Gump, she decided to stop her runs between Mansfield and Columbus one day after nine years. Coincidentally, this started the new chapter of her career in correctional medicine with Naphcare in Franklin County, Ohio. She moved to Tampa, Florida with Naphcare to work with a Pinnacle Award-winning team at Hillsborough County Jail serving almost 4,000 inmates, before acquiring her current role as the medical director of Pinellas County Jail. While she has been certified as an infection preventionist by CBIC since 2020, COVID-19 was not part of the course. One thing she has learned, when looking back at her career as student of medicine for the past 27 years, is that her failures have lent humility to her successes, and her successes have lent resilience to her failures.