Our Team
Joy started her college career as a collegiate swimmer and chemistry major at Mary Washington University aiming for a career in medicine. After some research she stumbled onto the option of a nurse practitioner degree. Nursing would allow her to spend time with patients, focus on wellness and education, and achieve more of a work/life/family balance. It was the perfect fit!
After graduating with a BSN from Radford University in 2005, she worked as a community health nurse in a clinic in Costa Rica, and then later as an ER and labor and delivery nurse for Lewis-Gale Hospital. In 2009 she graduated with a MSN as a family nurse practitioner. Upon graduation, Joy worked for 15 years in a wonderful, community based, family medicine practice, caring for patients of all ages including prenatal care, pediatric wellness and acute care, and adult care throughout the lifespan, especially of women.
After a personal journey of infertility in 2010, Joy became interested in a more integrative approach to wellness, including the impact of food and environment on health. She began studying nutrition more deeply, and adding evidence based integrative options to her family practice.
Another driver for change was the continual frustration in available options for patients with diagnosis such as mood disorders, gut dysbiosis, and hormone imbalances. In researching healing interventions for these patients, she stumbled onto the field of functional medicine.
"It was like discovering the missing piece, in my toolkit! I suddenly had better testing and treatment options for things that previously had been a group of symptoms I was just supposed to 'manage'. I began to feel so much more hopeful that healing truly could be more than just labeling disease and managing symptoms. I knew intuitively that food and environment mattered so much more than traditional medicine was acknowledging."
She began to study functional medicine as much as possible, integrating it into her clinical practice.
In 2022 she decided to pursue certification in functional medicine and was accepted to the IFM certification program, completing AFMCP in early 2023. With the challenge of applying functional medicine in a conventional setting becoming increasingly complex, Joy resigned her role with Carilion Clinic in 2023, to pursue a functional medicine private practice. In January of 2025 Renaissance Health was born.
In her spare time Joy hybrid homeschools her four children (with her amazing husband Brian), enjoys organic gardening, bee keeping, baking sourdough bread, reading, and all things weight lifting!