Jay Wellons MD, MSPH holds the Cal Turner Chair of Pediatric Neurosurgery and is the Chief of the Division of Pediatric Neurosurgery and Vice Chair of the Department of Neurosurgery at Vanderbilt University Medical Center (VUMC). He is a Professor in the Departments of Neurological Surgery, Pediatrics, Plastic Surgery, and Radiology.
He currently serves as President of the American Society of Pediatric Neurosurgeons and has served as co-chair of the editorial board of the Journal of Neurosurgery-Pediatrics and chaired the AANS/CNS Section on Pediatric Neurosurgery Annual Meeting that took place in Nashville in 2018.
Dr. Wellons received a B.A in English from the University of Mississippi in 1991, his medical degree from the University of Mississippi Medical School in 1995 and completed his residency in neurologic surgery at Duke University Medical Center in 2001. This was followed by a one-year fellowship in pediatric neurosurgery at the University of Alabama-Birmingham. He remained on faculty at UAB for a total of 10 years, obtaining an MSPH during that time, then came to Vanderbilt in September of 2012.
He has participated as a site investigator in two multi-institutional research networks centered on pediatric hydrocephalus and Chiari malformation surgical and patient-centered outcomes. While his past areas of interest include surgery for brain tumors, blood vessel malformations of the brain, and craniosynostosis, his current focus is on the surgical management of the Chiari Malformations, congenital neurosurgery, intrauterine neurosurgery, and lesions of the brachial plexus. He founded SOCKS (the Surgical Outcomes Center for Kids) at Vanderbilt in 2015 and served as the Medical Director until 2022. He also served as the VUMC Section of Surgical Sciences Vice Chair of Clinical Research from 2018-2022.
Dr. Wellons served as Program Director for the Neurosurgery Residency Training Program at Vanderbilt from 2014-2018 and was awarded the Robert S. McCleery Master Teacher Award for surgical resident education across all surgical disciplines by the Section of Surgical Sciences in 2022.
In addition to over 250 scientific publications, he has been a contributor to The New York Times Sunday Review, TIME, Garden and Gun Magazine, Fresh Air: NPR, and OprahDaily.com. His book All That Moves Us: A Pediatric Neurosurgeon, His Young Patients, and Their Stories of Grace and Resilience with publisher Penguin Random House debuted in June of 2022 and was named one of the top books of 2022 by The New Yorker and garnered a starred review by Publishers Weekly. His non-scientific writing focuses specifically on his specialty of pediatric neurosurgery, but also the broader field of medicine and the profound lessons learned from the children and parents that he has cared for over the last 30 years.
