Woodbury graduated cum laude from Mount Holyoke College and earned her medical degree from Meharry Medical College. Her training in endocrinology was at the New Jersey College of Medicine and the New York, Cornell Medical Center. At the University of Michigan Medical School, Woodbury was an assistant professor of Internal Medicine/Division of Endocrinology and Metabolism and Assistant Dean for Student and Minority Affairs. She was awarded the Alumnae Medal of Honor from MHC in 1983. She served on the Board of Trustees from 1985-1997 and was the board president of the Alumnae Association from 1994–1997. Woodbury had many different experiences and views on her time here, as seen in the quotes below.
“Throughout the four years there I experienced this thing of being known – at least by category – where I feel a white person would have been known singly. In some instances I felt that to them [white students] I would remain the individual black they had known as an exception to the general view they would still retain of blacks as a people.”
“MHC was a good atmosphere for individual expression and as militancy was a thing of the future, and experiences at MHC were not so threatening as to generate a desire to “fight,” I would characterize the majority of my time there as feeling non-racial.”*
*1973 Interview with Arrietta Walker for History 265 “Black and White Americans”
“It was at Mount Holyoke that I came to believe that I could be anything I wanted, despite the limitations widely associated with race and gender. I found a role model in Dr. Pattie Groves, and dared to pursue a career goal first conceived in watching my father at work, and caring for my mother. Mount Holyoke made the difference for me.”**
**Written in a pamphlet fundraising for the Equal Opportunity Fund, 1987/88