Faculty Profile: Dr. Mary Yarbrough

Dr. Yarbrough is the Executive Director of Health and Wellness at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville, TN. She has responsibility for engaging employees of Vanderbilt and other Mid-South employers in innovative programs that maximize well-being and productivity. Dr. Yarbrough joined the Vanderbilt faculty following a career in preventive medicine at the state, national and international levels. She translated these experiences into a holistic occupational model that integrates workplace, personal, and psychosocial services to influence health and safety.

In 1999, Dr. Yarbrough began the Vanderbilt Faculty and Physician Wellness Program to address the growing needs of professionals coping with stress, depression, addiction, and other emotional and behavioral issues. The program has worked with over 2800 University and Medical Center faculty and physicians since its inception, providing evaluation, skill-based training, coaching, counselling, and monitoring for addictions post treatment.

Prior to coming to Vanderbilt, Dr. Yarbrough served as the Director of Environmental Epidemiology for the State of Tennessee where her responsibilities included oversight of a multimillion US Department of Energy grant evaluating the impact of historical offsite contaminant releases from the Oak Ridge Nuclear Reservation. Her international experiences have in included community development in Africa and work with the Flying Doctor helicopter service in the jungles of Southeast Asia. She has served as a consultant to the World Health Organization.

Dr. Yarbrough is a Principle Investigator developing a national surveillance system to monitor personal protective equipment for the CDC. Her preventive medicine programming at Vanderbilt has received national and international recognition, including the American College of Occupational and Environmental Medicine (ACOEM) Corporate Health Achievement Award and the prestigious C. Everett Koop Award in health promotion.

Dr. Yarbrough received her B.Sc. in Biomedical Engineering and her MD from Vanderbilt University. She completed her residency in Internal Medicine at Vanderbilt and in Preventive Medicine at Johns Hopkins University, has faculty appointments in Internal Medicine and Preventive Medicine, is boarded by the American Board of Preventive Medicine in both Occupational Medicine and Public Health, is boarded by the American Board of Internal Medicine and is a former Luce Scholar. Dr. Yarbrough has lectured and served on numerous working groups related to the practice of preventive medicine.