Editor’s Note: Every year, the national medical group Castle Connolly compiles a list of the best doctors in America. In the Memphis area, the 2025 Top Doctors list comprises more than 400 physicians representing 60 specialties. Here, we introduce you to one of the caregivers who have been a Top Doc time and again. For a complete list, pick up a copy of our June 2024 issue from your favorite newsstand, or — even better — subscribe.
The practice of medicine runs in the family of Dr. Violiza Inoa, a neurologist with Semmes Murphey Clinic. Her father is an anesthesiologist, and growing up in the Dominican Republic, “I had that example,” she says. “I was very used to hospitals.”
Beyond the family connection, Inoa says she was attracted to medicine because “I always felt that I lived in a country where I needed to give back to the community, and I felt that medicine would be a very good way of doing that.”
When she began studying medicine, “I learned about neuroanatomy, and I was fascinated by it. I really think the brain is the coolest organ in the body,” she says. “In 2025, we still do not understand really well how it works. We’re still investigating how we can understand and heal the brain. So when I learned about it, I was blown away.”
And that’s not all she discovered in medical school. That’s where she met her husband, Dr. Andres Ramos, now a child and adolescent psychiatrist. “We met when we were 21,” she says, “and I think that helps, growing together and having a good understanding of each other’s passion and where we are headed in life.”
They have two daughters together, Sofia and Emma. “They’re very active. They’re very different. One of them looks exactly like my husband, and the other one looks exactly like me. It’s super cute!”
“We live in an area where strokes have higher rates of disability and death. We have younger patients having more strokes than anywhere else in the United States.” — Dr. Violiza Inoa
Does she think her daughters will follow their parents into the medical field? “I would not be surprised, because first of all, they see what I do,” she says. “It’s important that we encourage women interested in medicine to follow that path. Some women think that medicine is not a compatible career with a family, and I want them to look at people like me and other physicians that have a family and a life outside of medicine, who feel very passionate about their careers. We’re doing research and we are in positions of leadership.”
Inoa is currently an associate professor of neurology and neurosurgery at the University of Tennessee Health Science Center in addition to her practice at Semmes Murphey. She says her work in advanced, early intervention for stroke patients is especially important in the Mid-South, an area which has been called the “stroke belt.”
“We live in an area where strokes have higher rates of disability and death,” she says. “We have younger patients having more strokes than anywhere else in the United States,” she says.
After years of success in the United States, she never forgot her original goal of giving back to the community she came from. “How can you connect to your origins? I struggled with that for a little bit, and then I found an opportunity by enhancing education in stroke care in the Caribbean and in my country.”
Since 2019, Inoa has been working to educate doctors that practice neuro intervention. “We started in the Caribbean, expanded to Latin America, and now we’re essentially global. I’m leading efforts under the World Stroke Organization to teach doctors to do stroke thrombectomy — stroke surgery from inside the vessels.”
This work has been extremely rewarding, she says, “but I’m not going to lie to you. I started medicine, followed the path, and then had some difficulty looping around before finding my way back to what I really wanted to do.”
