21 October 2025

From Freefall to Forward Momentum: A Wounded Warrior Finding Purpose in Research

When you ask Retired SFC Edward (Eddie) Segovia what brought him to Geneva, he doesn’t start with a résumé line. He begins with a moment.

On a February night in 2019, during a training jump with his US Army parachute team, Eddie and a teammate collided under canopy. They spiraled from roughly 2,000 feet. He hit asphalt and grass. The landing was, in his words, “a complete miracle.” After three days in a medically induced coma, doctors warned his family that he might never walk again.

Eddie is matter-of-fact about what came next. There were months of inpatient, followed by stubborn, daily work to relearn the basics. “I was bedridden, but I gave it my all from bedside, just trying to walk again,” he says. Within two years, he was not only walking; he was back in the sky.

That resilience, quiet and relentless, now infuses his work at Geneva, where he is a Clinical Research Coordinator in North Carolina. Eddie served 16½ years on active duty in the US Army. Today, he channels that experience into research that improves the force’s health and readiness.

“It makes me feel very fulfilled,” he says. “It gives me purpose and direction.”

A mission that felt familiar, this time from the research side

Eddie found Geneva through someone who knows his story intimately: Kaleigh Presgraves, a longtime colleague

who was the medic on the ground the night of his accident. Years later, when Eddie

began searching for meaningful work after the military, Kaleigh pointed him to Geneva, an organization where his lived experience could strengthen research that directly serves warfighters.

Eddie is part of a research program where Geneva partners with military units to test wearable technology. These tools give soldiers and leaders clearer insight into sleep, recovery, and daily readiness. For a young soldier, the data the technology provides can be a wake-up call to prioritize rest or hydration. For a battalion staff, the 24-hour snapshot informs meal planning, training times, or recovery windows before a major exercise.

 

“What’s powerful is how quickly behavior starts to change,” Eddie explains. “Soldiers see their data and make adjustments. Leaders can take a snapshot of the formation and make data-driven decisions. It’s not just output; it’s outcomes.”

His credibility with formations is immediate. He speaks the language. He has lived the grind of training cycles, night operations, and the fatigue that accumulates at the margins. That perspective helps bridge the space between promising ideas and practical adoption, which is one of Geneva’s core roles in military medical research.

“Sometimes the most valuable credential is the lived experience that keeps research true to the warfighter,” Kaleigh says. “Eddie brings patient, operator, and now researcher perspectives all at once.”

Rebuilding identity, community, and purpose

Like many veterans, Eddie felt the weight of transition when he took off the uniform. “When you leave, that sense of community goes quiet,” he says. “My advice to other wounded warriors is to find community and something purposeful, and pick up a healthy hobby.”

He followed his own advice. He volunteers with the All Veteran Parachute Team, supporting community events and honoring Gold Star families. The jumps are spectacular, but the throughline is the connection. He stays close to a community of service while giving the public a powerful reminder of what military excellence looks like.

At Geneva, he found a different kind of community made up of researchers, clinicians, program teams, and leaders who share the same goal: better care, better readiness, and fewer lives lost. Some of those clinicians are the very people who cared for him in San Antonio. “I see myself among heroes,” Eddie says. “Supporting their research is a privilege.”

Learning on three tracks at once

Eddie is also back in school, pursuing graduate studies in psychology to contribute to cognitive and behavioral health research among active-duty service members and veterans. “Self-study, academic study, and work study, they all talk to each other right now,” he says. The coursework sharpens his eye for human factors and behavior change, and the job gives him a lab of life where those insights can be tested and translated to real units.

Kaleigh has watched that growth up close. “We first hired Eddie on the administrative side,” she says. “But once he stepped into non-human subject’s research, you could see it click. The passion was there. Soldiers relate to him, investigators rely on him, and he elevates what we choose to scale.”

“The ultimate warfighter caregiver”

Ask Eddie for one word to describe Geneva, and he laughs. “Beautiful” is his default word for anything extraordinary. Pressed for a phrase, he offers one that feels like a mission patch: “The ultimate warfighter caregiver.” He sees Geneva as an organization that is “battling behind the scenes” in research and development so warfighters do not have to.

There is a piece of parachute fabric hanging in Eddie’s office, the center cell from the canopy he was under the night he fell. It is a reminder of what he survived and why the work matters. From that night to this role, Eddie’s story is less about a single dramatic event than about what you do afterward, the daily choices to heal, to learn, and to serve again.

“We can do more for service members in this capacity than we could while we were in,” he says. “That is a whole new level of fulfillment.”

Editor’s note

This spotlight draws from a recorded interview on October 10, 2025. If you are a veteran or wounded warrior seeking meaningful work that keeps you connected to the mission, we invite you to explore opportunities with Geneva.