Mary Vargas, Esq.
Position: President and Chair, Board of Directors
Pain Community Advisory Council
Partner, Stein & Vargas, LLP
Mary C. Vargas is a founding partner of Stein & Vargas, LLP, a Maryland-based law firm specializing in the nationwide representation of individuals with disabilities in civil rights litigation.
Vargas serves as the president and chair of the American Pain Foundation’s Board of Directors (2012-2014) and is a founding member of APF’s Pain Community Advisory Council. In 2011, Vargas was appointed to the National Institutes of Health’s Interagency Pain Research Coordinating Committee. She received the American Academy of Pain Management’s Advocacy for People with Pain Award in 2010.
Vargas became interested in advocating for people with pain as the result of her own experiences following a car accident in 1996. After an odyssey of many years of disabling pain, more than 14 physicians and multiple surgeries, Vargas chose to have a spinal cord stimulator implanted. With the combination of the stimulator and pain medications, Vargas ultimately was able to resume a full and meaningful life.
She speaks nationally about the rights of people with pain, and has testified before federal agencies on matters relating to access to pain care and the rights of people with pain to access quality care. Vargas advocates for others living with pain by speaking to policymakers, elected officials and the media – telling her story as a way to illustrate the extent to which unmanaged pain can rob individuals, families and communities, and how much can be restored when a solution is found.
Vargas is co-author of Legal Rights, The Guide for People Who are Deaf and Hard of Hearing. Vargas was a Skadden Fellow (1998), Truman Scholar (1994), and Truman Senior Scholar (2002, 2003). Vargas graduated with honors from the University of Connecticut School of Law, where she was named to the Client Advocacy Board. Vargas served as student director of the Yale Law School Advocacy for Persons with Disabilities Clinic. She graduated summa cum laude from the honors program at the College of New Jersey where she majored in deaf education. Vargas lives in Western Maryland with her husband and three young sons.
