Kimberlee Wyche-Etheridge ’87, M.D., M.P.H., was elected to the Board of Trustees in 2021. Based in Nashville, Tenn., she serves as the senior vice president of Health Equity and Diversity Initiatives for the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials, a national organization focused on state-level public health leadership and practice. She is also an assistant professor of pediatrics and public health and a practicing physician focusing on adolescent medicine at Meharry Medical College. In her free time, she is a national speaker, a public health consultant, and the CEO of WycheEffect LLC.
Previously, Wyche-Etheridge served as interim director of the Meharry Master of Science in Public Health Program and assistant director of the Division of Public Health Practice. She held a similar role at Tennessee State University prior to transitioning to Meharry. Before that, she directed the Family, Youth and Infant Health Bureau of the Metropolitan Nashville/Davidson County public health department from 2001 to 2013.
Wyche-Etheridge majored in English and Spanish while fulfilling premedical requirements at Amherst. She earned her M.D. from the University of Massachusetts Medical School in Worcester in 1993; trained in pediatrics at the Children’s National Medical Center in Washington, D.C.; and continued her education with an M.P.H. from the Harvard School of Public Health while completing a fellowship in minority health policy in 2000.
Wyche-Etheridge has won numerous awards for her work in public health—particularly maternal, infant and adolescent health in urban populations. In 2003, she founded the Nashville chapter of the Birthing Project, an international infant mortality reduction initiative. Involved with many school health committees, nonprofit groups and advisory boards, she has served as medical director for Birthing Project USA and was the longtime chair of the board of directors for CityMatCH, a national urban maternal/child health organization. Her Amherst alumni activities have included holding the College’s Wade Fellowship from 2000 to 2002 and again from 2013 to 2014. In 2021 she hosted an introductory public health class for Amherst students during Interterm.