Dr Emily Williams, BSc, PhD

Visiting Research Fellow

Emily Williams is a post-doctoral research fellow from the UK, funded by a four-year Diabetes UK Fellowship. Her project is a collaboration between the IPHU, Imperial College London, and the Baker IDI Heart and Diabetes Institute, investigating the socioeconomic and ethnic inequalities in type 2 diabetes. Emily’s research interests lie within the fields of health psychology and social epidemiology; her previous work has examined the psychological, social, and behavioural predictors of chronic disease, with a particular focus on disadvantaged and ethnic minority groups.  Emily’s current research programme will incorporate data from population-based longitudinal observational studies in Australia (AusDiab) and the UK (SABRE study) and from community and larger scale interventions, in the developed and developing world. In her previous position within the Department of Epidemiology and Public Health at University College London, Emily Williams taught on the Social Epidemiology M.Sc. course, contributing in particular to the Ethnicity and Health module.  Emily has completed the compulsory module within the Postgraduate Certificate for Learning and Teaching in Higher Education, required for all lecturers in the UK.  Currently, Emily is tutoring on the Research Methods (2013) module of the Masters in Public Health within the department.

Emily is also the primary investigator on a Faculty Strategic Grant entitled ‘The relationship between inflammation and psychosocial risk factors in the development and progression of type 2 diabetes’.  This study plans to use existing and new AusDiab data to explore the inflammatory mechanisms that may link psychosocial adversity to the development of impaired glucose metabolism. Emily is also an Associate Investigator on the Kerala Diabetes Prevention Program, targeting high risk individuals for the development of type 2 diabetes using a lifestyle and peer support intervention programme.  In addition, Emily is contributing to the psychosocial assessment of the AusDiab3 study, a 12-year follow-up of the largest ever Australian longitudinal population-based study.