Juan Parodi was led to a career in surgery through his own interest and family influence - his uncle was a surgeon. In 1960 he began his medical training at the Universidad del Salvador, Buenos Aires, Argentina. After receiving an MD degree at the
University of Salvador in 1968, Juan Parodi entered the general surgery residency in the former M. Castex Hospital which he finished in 1972. He did postgraduate fellowship at the
University of Illinois at Chicago and following it did another one at the
Cleveland Clinic with emphasis on
vascular surgery. From 1975 to 1976 Parodi served as chief resident at the Cleveland Clinic, where Professor Alfred Humphries and Edwin Beven became two significant mentors in his career. It was during that last year 1976 that he committed all his wits to develop a new minimally invasive surgical technique that would change the future of the then infant specialty of vascular surgery and in particular aortic aneurysm surgery. In 2005, Juan Parodi was celebrated as the creator of the Parodi Endograft, "one of the biggest innovations in the history of vascular surgery". He is adjunct surgical research professor,
University of Michigan, USA. In 1980, Juan Parodi removed a gangrenous gall bladder from a poor Argentinian priest and did it without any payment. Years later, he found out who that poor priest was,
Jorge Bergoglio. In 2014, Parodi and his wife was invited to visit that priest, now Pope Francis, at the Vatican and to be thanked for caring for another person without compensation. ==Awards and others==