About Dr. Dionna Williams

Dionna W. Williams, Ph.D. (she/they)

Image Citation

Dionna Whitney Williams, Ph.d., assistant professor of molecular and comparative pathobiology. Johns Hopkins Medicine. (n.d.). Retrieved March 11, 2023, from https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/profiles/details/dionna-williams 

 

Dionna W. Williams grew up in a low-income community (Dionna Williams, NIDA Diversity Workshop) in Bridgeport, Connecticut (BlackInImmuno, Twitter) which inspired much of their research into the effect of substances on the brain. Williams was also the first in their family to go to college (Dionna WIlliams, NIDA Diversity Workshop) and graduated cum laude with their bachelor's degree in biochemistry from Hofstra University in 2009 (Dionna W. Williams, Phd). They then went on to receive their doctorate in biomedical science from the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in 2014 and then completed their postdoctoral fellowship at Johns Hopkins (Dionna W. Williams, Phd). During their time as a postdoctoral fellow they conducted research in pharmacology, immunology and health disparities and received a certificate in Health Disparities and Health Inequalities from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health (Dionna W. Williams, Phd). Dr. Williams currently works as an assistant professor in the Departments of Molecular and Comparative Pathobiology and Medicine and the Division of Clinical Pharmacology at Johns Hopkins and is a co-director of the Central Nervous System Dysfunction Scientific Working Group at Johns Hopkins’s Center for AIDS Research (Dionna W. Williams, Ph.d. '14). They have been awarded the NIDA Early Career Investigator Showcase Travel Award and a Junior Investigator Pioneer Award from the International Society for NeuroVirology and was chosen as one of 100 Inspiring Black Scientists in America (Dionna W. Williams, Ph.d. '14).