Meet the Champion: Jill Fussell, MD, holder of the Harvey and Bernice Jones Endowed Chair in Developmental Pediatrics

Learn more about this Champion for Children and what makes her excited about her work on behalf of the children of our state in the video below.

Dr. Fussell graduated from Louisiana State University (LSU) in Baton Rouge with an undergraduate degree in psychology and earned her medical degree from the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences (UAMS) in 1997. Dr. Fussell completed a pediatric residency and developmental-behavioral pediatrics (DBP) fellowship at the Medical University of South Carolina. After completing the fellowship, she joined UAMS as a clinical instructor in 2002 and is now a professor in the Department of Pediatrics at UAMS.

She is the Section Chief of the Division of Developmental Pediatrics and Rehabilitative Medicine and the Service Chief of Rehabilitative and Physical Medicine at Arkansas Children’s Hospital (ACH). She is the medical director of Arkansas’s foster care assessment program, Project for Adolescent and Child Evaluation. She served as medical director of the Dennis Developmental Center from 2011-2018. She is very involved in pediatric resident and fellow education at UAMS/ACH and has served as the program director of the UAMS Developmental-Behavioral Pediatrics Fellowship since 2007. She has been awarded the UAMS Department of Pediatrics Educator of the Year award three times.

 "Within developmental and behavioral pediatrics, a lot of what we do is evaluate children for delays or disorders, Autism spectrum being one of them we commonly see and diagnose," says Dr. Fussell. "Our goal is to get children diagnosed as early as we can to get them the appropriate treatment and services.

Within rehab medicine, there’s a broad range of patients we evaluate and treat for issues with their motor system or muscles," she continues. "That can range from Cerebral Palsy and Spina Bifida to children with spinal cord injuries."