Emily C. Williams

Biography
Emily Williams, PhD is an addictions health services and disparities researcher and an implementation scientist. She serves as Professor of Health Systems and Population Health and Director of the Doctoral Program in Health Services at the University of Washington. She also has affiliate appointments at the Denver-Seattle Center of Innovation for Veteran-Centered Value-Driven Care at VA Puget Sound Health Services Research & Development (HSR&D) and Kaiser Permanente Washington Health Research Institute.
Dr. Williams has been on the editorial board of Addiction Science & Clinical Practice since its inception as an open access journal in 2012 and was named co-Editor-in-Chief in 2021. She has over 200 publications and over 20 years of experience translating evidence-based interventions into clinical settings. She received state-of-the-art training in implementation science from the Implementation Science Institute at Washington University, and she was an incoming fellow for the 2022 (inaugural) Intersectionality Training Institute Summer Intensive program in Philadelphia. She served as an invited coach in the National Institute of Drug Abuse’s (NIDA) 2022 Diversity Scholars Network.
She is interested in structural and related social determinants of health and their impacts on communities’ and individuals’ lived experiences, health behaviors, access to and receipt of health care, and health outcomes. She applies these interests to a research portfolio focused on substance use and HIV and specifically on understanding barriers to and increasing access to evidence-based care for unhealthy alcohol and opioid use in medical settings (e.g., primary care and HIV clinics) and community settings (e.g., syringe service programs and community pharmacies). Her research portfolio focuses in large part on communities disproportionately adversely impacted by structures that determine inequitable access to resources.
Dr. Williams’s studies include mixed methods formative and summative evaluations of implementation efforts and clinically-relevant policies, clinical epidemiology using large health systems data, and hybrid trials testing implementation strategies to improve care. She, in partnership with others, currently leads research on tailoring and testing practice facilitation to implement evidence-based alcohol-related care in HIV clinics, refining decision aids to address unhealthy alcohol use and HIV prevention; in primary care, particularly among LGBT patients and women; and evaluating the influence of COVID-19-related policies on racialized disparities in receipt of and retention in treatment for opioid use disorders. She works in partnership with diverse and interdisciplinary researchers at multiple career stages and uses Critical Race Theory and community-engaged methods to guide her disparities research.
Dr. Williams also mentors junior investigators at all stages and serves as multiple PI on two federally-funded training grants in HSPop–an AHRQ T32 and the “Training in Equity and Structural Solutions for Addictions” T32, funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse and leads the Alcohol, Behavior, and Health Services Core within the Veterans Aging Cohort Study (VACS) of persons living with HIV.