[2] Roselyn Elizabeth Payne was born on December 11, 1930 in Little Rock, Arkansas,[3] but grew up in Savannah, Georgia.

She attended Howard University in Washington D.C. where she majored in zoology and chemistry and continued her medical education there, graduating in 1955.

[1] From 1984 to 1989, Epps, acting as chief of Child Development Division and director of the Child Development Center at Howard University, worked on a project to help identify children with learning disabilities and assist them, their schools, and their parents.

During this time she focused on spreading knowledge about smoking prevention and cessation research results both nationally and internationally.

A year after that, in 1992, Epps was the first African American woman to become president of the Medical Society of the District of Columbia.