Dr. Consuelo H. Wilkins is Senior Vice President and Senior Associate Dean for Health Equity and Inclusive Excellence, and Professor of Medicine at Vanderbilt University Medical Center (VUMC) where she oversees a portfolio of programs in clinical research, education and population health. Dr. Wilkins, an elected member of the National Academy of Medicine, is a widely-recognized thought leader in health equity and has pioneered new approaches to engaging marginalized and socioeconomically disadvantaged populations in clinical research.  

Dr. Wilkins is a Principal Investigator of three NIH-funded centers – the Vanderbilt-Miami-Meharry Center for Excellence in Precision Medicine and Population Health, which focuses on decreasing disparities among African Americans and Latinos using precision medicine; and the Vanderbilt Recruitment Innovation Center, a national center dedicated to enhancing recruitment and retention in clinical trials, and the Vanderbilt Institute for Clinical and Translational Research (CTSA), which serves as the home for clinical and translational science at VUMC. Her research team, the Wilkins Health Equity and Engagement Lab (WHEEL), has developed new methods and tools intended to catalyze health equity research broadly including instruments to assess trust in African American men (funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation) and a measure of the person-centeredness of research (funded by the Patient Centered Outcomes Research Institute). She is currently Director of the Engagement Core director of the All of Us Research Program, a national precision medicine project which will enroll one million participants.

Prior to her current roles, Dr. Wilkins served as Executive Director, Meharry-Vanderbilt Alliance (2012-2020) and Professor of Medicine.

At Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, she was an Associate Professor in the Department of Medicine, Division of Geriatrics, with secondary appointments in Psychiatry and Surgery (Public Health Sciences)

Dr. Wilkins earned a Bachelor of Science in microbiology (magna cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa) and Doctor of Medicine from Howard University. She completed residency training in Internal Medicine at Duke University Medical Center and Geriatric Medicine fellowship at Washington University School of Medicine/Barnes-Jewish Hospital. Following her medical training, she earned a Master of Science in Clinical Investigation from Washington University School of Medicine.