Meet Ashley Molinaro
In 2016 Ashley Sanford Molinaro of Virginia Beach was ready to get involved in her community, and she knew just how to do that: join a Rotary Club. Ashley, a Ph.D. student at Old Dominion University, has seen her mother Deb Sanford enjoy being president of the Rotary Club of Bangor in Maine. For Ashley, Rotary was a natural way to connect to volunteer and meet people in the Hampton Roads region where she now lives.
After checking out websites for Rotary Clubs throughout our region, Ashley connected with our club because of our format and how well our website represents us. Her first Rotary Club of Norfolk meeting was a Suds & Buds planning session. From there she became a regular meeting visitor before joining our club a few months ago. She currently is co-chair of volunteers for our club''s May 19 Suds & Buds party.
Ashley grew up in Bangor and graduated from Norwich University in Vermont with a biology degree. She attended college on a Navy ROTC scholarship and was commissioned as a Navy officer after graduation. She was stationed in Norfolk on the USS Nimitz, an Arleigh Burke-class destroyer, for four years as a navigator. She then spent two years working for the Coast Guard in Portsmouth as an advisor to the commander of the Atlantic region. She is a lieutenant who is in the Navy reserves. Ashley and her husband Rob, a Navy officer, live in Virginia Beach and have a daughter Paige who will be 2 in June.
In 2014 Ashley started in a master's program in biomedical science at ODU but soon transferred her credits to ODU's Ph.D. program. She is concentrating in microbiology and hopes to work for a federal lab studying infectious disease. Ashley spends most of her days in an ODU lab conducting experiments related to bacteria that causes Iraqi fever, is a leading cause of hospital acquired infections and is antibiotic resistant.
"I like our club a lot," Ashley says. "There are a lot of inspirational people in Rotary, and I'm amazed at how much time people dedicate to Rotary."