PATRICE WILLIAMS

Patrice C. Williams joins C2C as the inaugural Assistant Research Professor of Participatory Action Research and Provost Impact Fellow. Previously, Dr. Williams was a Research Scientist in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at MIT, an Intramural Research Training Award (IRTA) Postdoctoral Fellow in the Epidemiology Branch of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, and a Health Policy Research Scholar in the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Program. Patrice’s research focuses on the need for urban planners and public health officials to iteratively explore the context of urban planning policies, processes, and practices in a participatory and codesigning process that reduces the maladaptive outcomes and maximize health equity benefits in areas such as climate-related health outcomes and the impact of greenspace redevelopment on housing displacement. In addition to authoring agency reports and white papers, she has also published in peer reviewed journals such as Preventive Medicine, Health & Place, Journal of the American Planning Association, Social Science and Medicine, and Landscape and Urban Planning.  

 Dr. Williams is a member of the Healthy Neighborhoods Research Consortium, which leads the Healthy Neighborhoods Study (HNS) – a 7-year multidisciplinary, multi-site participatory action research project focused on neighborhood change, climate-related exposures, community resilience, and health equity in 9 low-income, racially/ethnically diverse communities in metropolitan Boston. She will also continue to build the Participatory action research Analytic Network (PAN) which she co-developed to mentor doctoral students, early career researchers, and community scholars who were selected nationally to participate in a one-year Emerging Scholars Fellowship Program. Dr. Williams earned a B.S. in Biomathematics, B.A. in Music, a Master’s in Public Health, and a Ph.D. in Urban and Regional Planning—all from Florida State University.