David R. Williams

Public health sociologist
David R. Williams asks: What if we decided to tackle the striking levels of early death and poor health that are due to the color of one's skin?

Why you should listen

Dr. David R. Williams has played a visible national leadership role in raising awareness levels about health disparities and identifying interventions to address them. The author of more than 400 scientific papers, Williams developed the Everyday Discrimination Scale, which is currently one of the most widely used measures to assess perceived discrimination in health studies. He was ranked as the world's most cited black scholar in the social sciences in 2008, and Thomson Reuters ranked him as one of the world's most influential scientific minds in 2014. 

Williams is currently the Norman Professor of Public Health at Harvard's T. H. Chan School of Public Health and Professor of African and African American Studies and of Sociology at Harvard University. He holds an MPH degree from Loma Linda University and a PhD in Sociology from the University of Michigan.

David R. Williams’ TED talk