Initiative for Environmental-Health Disparities and Medicine
Vanessa Elliott
Dr. Vanessa E. Elliott is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Family and Community Medicine. She is a licensed clinical psychologist who has longstanding research and clinical interests in behavioral medicine and psychological assessment. Dr. Elliott’s clinical practice includes both children and adults who receive primary care in the family medicine clinics and has been focused on incorporating lifestyle modifications as an adjunct to the medical treatment plan. She also provides consultation services regarding psychosocial issues during teaching rounds to the Department’s team of students and resident physicians. Presently, she is validating and calibrating an environmental history questionnaire that will be used to recruit pregnant African American women into a prospective cohort study of childhood development.
Prior to joining the faculty at Meharry in 2005, Dr. Elliott was a faculty member at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine in the Department of Pediatrics. While at Vanderbilt, she provided diagnostic assessments in the Center for Child Development and came to appreciate the importance of early screening and intervention efforts in the first three years of life in order to improve outcomes for children diagnosed with autism, mental retardation, and other developmental disorders. Her affiliation with the MMC-VU ARCH consortium program allows her to combine her clinical interests and work collaboratively with colleagues in the Basic Sciences in translational research investigating the role of environmental contaminant exposure on early childhood development.
Dr. Elliott earned her Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology from the University of Memphis in 1998. She is a 1993 summa cum laude graduate of Tougaloo College in Tougaloo, MS, where she earned a B.A. in Psychology and a certificate in Gerontology. Dr. Elliott completed a clinical pre-doctoral internship at the University of Washington in Seattle, WA in 1998 and a post-doctoral fellowship at St. Jude Children’s Research Center in Memphis, TN in 2000.
