Navarro received her bachelor of arts in social welfare from California State University, Long Beach in 1981 and earned a master’s in social work from San Diego State University in 1983. She went on to work for Kaiser Permanente in San Diego as a social worker in home health, hospice and continuing care. While there, she helped launch a geriatric assessment clinic and worked on a team with a geriatrician, a nurse practitioner and a clinic coordinator to support older adults and connect them with services appropriate for their needs. She continued this mission as a clinical services coordinator at Huntington Hospital in Pasadena.

After more than two decades of frontline experience helping her teams serve the needs of older adults, Navarro realized she could offer more to the field if she were able to teach and assist with building evidence on what interventions were beneficial to functionally impaired older adults.

During her PhD program at USC, Navarro had the opportunity to work as an evaluator for the Los Angeles County Elder Abuse Forensic Center, an interprofessional and interagency collaboration founded to help resolve complex cases of alleged elder abuse in the county. She says it inspired her to think more about the complex domain of decision-making capacity — a person’s ability to make reasoned decisions regarding their medical, legal, financial or other everyday living choices — and how this factors into providing the greatest quality in care planning and intervention.

After receiving her PhD in 2011, Navarro conducted research and taught graduate social work students as an associate professor at Azusa Pacific University. She was also appointed assistant clinical professor in the Keck School of Medicine of USC Department of Family Medicine, which led to her consulting with the National Center on Elder Abuse and the Administration for Community Living.

Navarro is co-founder of the USC Verdugo Hills Hospital’s Community Resource Center for Aging (CRCA), launched in 2020. Staffed by social workers specialized in serving older adults, the center helps older people with quality of life by improving awareness and access. Callers are linked to a robust network of community-based services and support. Through options counseling, the staff assess each individual’s functional abilities and, to the extent possible, incorporate self-determination in care planning.