Dr. J. Clay Wellborn, Jr. is a lifelong resident of Arkansas. He grew up in Little Rock where he attended Catholic High School for Boys. After college in Virginia, he returned to UAMS for Medical School where he was a Barton Research Scholar, The Lange Book Award Winner, Alpha Omega Alpha Honor Society member and winner of the E. Forest Ellis Award for Outstanding Surgical Student. To complete his training as a surgeon, he completed a five-year General Surgical Residency at UAMS, which included training in Bariatric Surgery.
He is Board Certified by the American Board of Surgery a Fellow with the American College of Surgery, and also a Fellow of the American Society for Metabolic and Bariatric Surgery. He is also a member of the Pulaski County and Arkansas Medical Society, and a member of the American Society for Bariatric Surgery, in which he is one of two Arkansas physicians serving as an ASBS committee member on a national level. Dr. Wellborn recently has been approved as an American Society for Metabolic and Bariatric Surgery Bariatric Surgery Center of Excellence. He is a Clinical Professor at UAMS and has UAMS residents working with him year round. He also serves as the Bariatric Medical Director at St. Vincent Health in Little Rock.
Dr. Wellborn entered practice in 1984 and has been performing Bariatric Surgery for the past 24 years. Each year his Bariatric practice has grown to the point that Bariatric Surgery is now 95% of his practice. As a gastric bypass surgeon, he has performed over two thousand gastric bypass procedures, and has a particular interest in Laparoscopic Bariatric surgery. In April 2001 he was among the first 50 surgeons in the United States to be trained in the LAP-BAND® Adjustable Gastric Banding System, and since August 2001, he has performed more than 2000 Laparoscopic Adjustable Gastric Banding procedures.
Dr. Wellborn has been married for 25 years to his wife Suzan Wellborn, who is an RN, a personal trainer and his office manager. Suzan has also recently become one of the first Certified Bariatric Nurses in the state of Arkansas, and one of the first 250 in the country. Suzan has also been chosen by Allergan to be a preceptor instructing other healthcare professional how to do Lapband adjustments. They have five children ages from age 19 to 30, and a new granddaughter Caroline Clay born July 11, 2007, and a second grandaughter born September 11th, 2008 named Grace Catherine, and Mary Mills was born September 1st, 2009. Dr. Wellborn loves teaching surgery and medicine to his residents, watching his sons play football, reading historical novels, duck hunting, playing the guitar and sailing with his family.