Advisory Board

Dr. L. Cole Barfield has been a practicing internist at The Frist Clinic since 2015 and serves on the Medical Executive Committee for Centennial Medical Center, HCA's flagship hospital in Nashville, TN. 

Additionally, he serves as a medical advisor to Nashville-based technology and preventative wellness company Wellview Health. Dr. Barfield completed his undergraduate education at Princeton University and earned his M.D. from Vanderbilt University Medical School. He also has an M.B.A. from Vanderbilt's Owen Graduate School of Management. Dr. Barfield is Board Certified in Internal Medicine. Dr. Barfield has a passion for the future of medical education and is excited about the opportunity to build an innovative program at The Frist College of Medicine at Belmont University.  

Oscar Lovelace is a rural physician who started a solo practice in 1988 after serving as chief resident of the University of Virginia family medicine residency program. Lovelace Family Medicine, located in Prosperity, SC, the hometown of his paternal forefathers, is an independent practice providing hospital and ambulatory care. He delivered over 200 babies his second year of solo practice then after Newberry county lost it’s last obstetrician, he helped organize a mini fellowship experience to train his group of family physicians to perform cesarean sections and postpartum tubal ligations. During a five-year period when only family physicians were serving the county, the group lowered minority infant mortality by 68%.  In 2014, he was named South Carolina’s Family Physician of the Year by the S.C. Academy of Family Physicians. In 2015 he was named America’s Physician of the Year by the American Academy of Family Physicians. During the first two years of the Covid pandemic, the practice administered 25,500 vaccine doses in a 5 county area.

William L. Roper, MD, MPH, is professor of medicine and public health at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.  He previously served as Dean of the School of Medicine and of the School of Public Health, CEO of UNC Health Care, and Interim President of the statewide UNC System. Before coming to UNC, he served in the federal government as Director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Director of the White House Office of Policy Development, and head of the Medicare and Medicaid programs.  He is a pediatrician.