Growing up in Miami, David Zambrana was the child of Cuban immigrants. “Working hard and making a difference was at the root of what we heard at the dinner table,” he recalls. “My mom used to say, ‘Don’t walk into a room and walk out unless you leave it better than you found it.’ You know — ‘It’s a gift to be in this country. Don’t be a burden on anyone. You’re going to go to school because you’re going to do better than I did,’ was basically the mantra of how my sister and I were raised.”

Zambrana caught the nursing bug when his older sister went into nursing school. At Jackson Memorial Hospital in Miami, he worked in cardiac surgery intensive care, trauma and pediatric intensive care. He moved into administration across the street at the University of Miami Hospital, when he became chief nursing officer, then chief operating officer, then chief executive officer. Along the way he picked up an MBA and a Ph.D.

Now he’s come full circle. He returned to Jackson Memorial in 2016 as its CEO, and today he’s the executive vice president and COO of Jackson Health System, Miami-Dade’s taxpayer-owned health care network, which includes seven hospitals as well as urgent care centers and primary care centers.

His business degree gives him credibility in the business world, but he’ll always think in medical terms: “Every single day, every single problem, every single opportunity, every single challenge that we go through, I can’t help but first start thinking about it from the perspective of the nurse or the clinician or the technologist or the caregiver” who’s on the front lines.

“If a surgeon says to me, ‘Such-and-such went wrong in the OR,’ right away I can understand what they’re telling me.”