About
Dr. Kofoworola D.A. Williams is a social and behavioral scientist and mental health disparities investigator with an extensive background in public health and health behavior change theory. She now serves as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Community Health and Prevention at Dornsife School of Public Health as part of the Drexel FIRST (Faculty Institutional Recruitment for Sustainable Transformation) program.
Dr. Williams’ research program is dedicated to the Black men in her life. Her research program is two-fold, employing a human-centered framework and mixed-methods to a) understand how social, behavioral, and structural determinants impact individual mental health and help-seeking behavior and b) investigate the role social media and digital technologies play in improving mental health symptoms and mental health care access among those who are traditionally excluded. These areas of work converge to lay the foundation for future intervention work and inform best practices and approaches for developing digital mental health interventions that are culturally appropriate, accessible, useful, and sustainable.
Before Drexel FIRST, Dr. Williams was a NRSA T32 postdoctoral research fellow in digital mental health at the Center for Behavioral Intervention Technologies (CBITs) at Northwestern University's Feinberg School of Medicine. She is a 2022 recipient of a Health Disparities Research Loan Repayment Award from The National Institute of Mental Health and a 2021 scholar of The National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities’ Health Disparities Research Institute. Dr. Williams earned her Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) degree in Social and Behavioral Sciences from the Department of Health Behavior and Policy at Virginia Commonwealth University’s School of Medicine where she was also a Southern Regional Education Board (SREB) Doctoral Scholar. She has a Bachelor of Science (BS) in Biology and a Certificate of Advanced Study in Global Health from Syracuse University, and a Master of Public Health, Environmental and Occupational Health concentration, from Dornsife School of Public Health.