John L. Tarpley, MD, FWACS, FACS trained in medicine at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine.  General Surgery residency was at Johns Hopkins Hospital, Baltimore, Maryland and included two years of Surgical Oncology research and training at the National Institutes of Health, National Cancer Institute, Surgery Branch, in Bethesda, MD and six months of thoracic surgery training under Mr. Ronald Belsey of the Frenchay Hospital in the Bristol, England area.  Tarpley’s entry level position was at the Baptist Medical Centre, Ogbomoso, Nigeria and the University Teaching Hospital, University of Ibadan, Ibadan, Nigeria for twelve years between 1978-1993 with each fourth year spent back at the Baltimore VA Medical Center and Hopkins.  Tarpley returned to Vanderbilt and the Nashville VA MC from 1993-2016 where he served as Program for General Surgery for ~ 20 years. After retiring mid 2016 from the Nashville VA and Vanderbilt as Professor of Surgery & Anesthesiology, Emeritus, the Tarpleys have spent 2016 through the present in surgical education at the AIC Kijabe Hospital, Kenya, the University Teaching Hospital Kigali in Rwanda, and currently in the Department of Surgery, Faculty of Medicine, the University of Botswana.
‘tarp’ quickly acknowledges that Maggie Tarpley, librarian, resource Ninja, editor, and non-physician surgical educator drives and keeps afloat “team tarpley”.