Ishan Williams

Ishan is an Associate Professor at the University of Virginia, School of Nursing, who teaches health policy, qualitative methods, health promotion, and culture and diversity courses – studies broadly quality of life and healthcare among older adults and their family caregivers, with a particular eye on vulnerable populations. She is trained as a social-behavioral scientist, concentrating her training and expertise in family gerontology. She has conducted health outcomes research focusing on aging issues across the lifespan and how they impact individuals and their families that provide care and support for them over time. Her funded research spans projects using community-based research approaches to health promotion among populations that have been affected disproportionately from health disparities and disease (i.e., often those who have been marginalized and under-represented in clinical and behavioral research). Dr. Williams brings expertise focusing on the intersection of behavioral health and health policy. 

She also collaborates with colleagues across the country on work focused on Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare, with her key foci center a diversity of caregiver perspectives (from nurses, surgeons, respiratory therapists, anesthesiologists, and lab techs, among others) to qualify meanings derived and actionable items to pursue from patient data and ensuring that the data itself comes from patients across racial, ethnic, socio-economic, and geographic domains.

Williams earned a degree in psychology at UNC Chapel Hill, a MS and a PhD in human development and family studies at UNC Greensboro before completing a postdoctoral fellowship at UNC Chapel Hill’s Institute on Aging. Her research has been published in various peer-reviewed journals (e.g., Journal of Gerontology: Social Sciences, Journal of Applied Gerontology, and The Gerontologist). She has been an active member in the Gerontological Society of America (GSA) and is a Fellow of GSA.