Mary Williams is an Assistant Professor of Epidemiology with a joint appointment in the Department of Family Medicine at the OU-TU School of Community Medicine and is the George Kaiser Family Foundation Chair in Public Health Biostatistics. As a methodologist, Dr. Williams specializes in developing methods through community engagement and a Community Based Participatory Research (CBPR) framework to investigate infectious and chronic diseases in underserved, vulnerable, and hard-to-reach populations. The majority of her work has involved direct collaboration with community stakeholders to ensure methods are feasible and findings are relevant and actionable. Her areas of focus include nutritional epidemiology and infectious diseases. She has collaborated with multiple tribal nations, the Oklahoma State Department of Health (OSDH), and regional and statewide agencies, such as Regional Food Bank of Oklahoma, Community Food Bank of Eastern Oklahoma, and Hunger-Free Oklahoma. She served as a co-investigator and lead methodologist on two NIH-funded CBPR projects where she collaborated with multiple tribal partners to design community-level interventions to increase access to fruits and vegetables. She currently is a co-investigator and lead methodologist for a NIH-funded CBPR study designed to improve insulin resistance among people with HIV. In other nutrition-focused work, Dr. Williams has collaborated with Oklahoma’s regional food banks on a statewide project to assess the needs of Oklahoma’s charitable food systems and food bank client population and with Hunger-Free Oklahoma on an evaluation of a statewide program to increase access to fruits and vegetables for low-income Oklahomans. These projects have contributed to a nation-wide dialog of how to improve health of those accessing charitable food programs and improving access to healthy, nutritious foods for low-income populations. In addition to nutritional epidemiology, Dr. Williams has collaborated with community partners to investigate the effects of infectious diseases, such as hepatitis C virus and COVID-19, in their populations. She collaborated with Cherokee Nation on the development of the first hepatitis C virus elimination program in the United States, collaborated with OSDH on a vulnerability analysis of counties to HIV and HCV infection, and currently works with tribal and community partners to investigate the impact of COVID-19 in their populations. Dr. Williams teaches graduate level courses in epidemiology, infectious disease epidemiology, and medical statistics for Public Health and Health Professional students.