With more than 20 years of experience in health care delivery and systems design, Dr. Michael D. Williams is passionate about health care equity issues. Dr. Williams joined UVA in 2012 as an Associate Professor of Surgery and Director, Emergency General Surgery in the Department of Surgery. He served as the Director of the UVA Center for Health Policy, a joint program of the Batten School, the School of Medicine and the Department of Public Health Sciences. The Center for Health Policy provided comprehensive, apolitical analysis of current and proposed health policy for citizens and policymakers. He has also served as the Director of the UVA Summer Medical and Dental Education Program, which was established by a major grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The program aims to help under-represented minority students become more competitive candidates for medical school.

After completing his undergraduate studies in Biology at Brown University, Dr. Williams earned his MD from the UVA School of Medicine. From 1993 to 1998, he conducted his postgraduate medical training in the field of General Surgery at Louisiana State University – New Orleans program at Charity Hospital. After residency, he returned to Washington, D.C. and completed one-year fellowships in Surgical Critical Care and Trauma Surgery. Williams’ public sector experience also includes serving as Chief Medical Officer for the Washington, D.C. Fire and EMS Department.

He has held numerous leadership positions in both clinical and academic medicine, and has many peer-reviewed publications to his credit, including the recent co-authored article, “The Prehospital and Hospital Costs of Emergency Care for Frequent Emergency Department Patients” in the American Journal of Emergency Medicine.