“I’m certainly very excited about this opportunity to serve the College as its president. It’s the College’s role to try to get people to feel passionate about the issues that affect all of us, and then to channel that passion into efforts that can benefit individuals and the College as a whole. "
During his previous two years as president elect, Dr. Williams served on several committees of the ACMG Board of Directors and ACMG Foundation Board. Dr. Williams has been actively involved with ACMG for more than 20 years. During one of his early volunteer positions with the College, as chair of the Economics of Genetic Services Committee from 2000 to 2006, he helped publish the first genetic services reimbursement manual, still in use today, that became a transformative resource not only for College members but for outside groups, as well. He also served on the ACMG Board of Directors from 2007 to 2013 and as Vice President for Clinical Genetics from 2009 to 2013, and he organized and then chaired the Special Interest Group on Quality Improvement in Clinical Genetics.
Dr. Williams is a member of numerous national professional societies, including the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Society of Human Genetics, the American Medical Informatics Association, and the American College of Medical Informatics (ACMI). He is one of only three individuals who have dual board certification in clinical genetics and clinical informatics, and he is the only board-certified clinical geneticist who has also been elected as a fellow of ACMI—a mark of his contribution to informatics research. Of note, in 2013 he was recognized by Bio-IT World with the Best Practice Award in Genomics Grand Prize for co-leading a project that tested a “Genome-Phenome Analyzer” as a point-of-care tool to help clinicians improve diagnosis.
Currently, Dr. Williams volunteers with the American Medical Informatics Association Genomics and Translational Bioinformatics Working Group, the Institute of Medicine Electronic Health Record Action Collaborative, the National Human Genome Research Institute Genomic Medicine Working Group Planning Committee, and the NIH Undiagnosed Diseases Program External Scientific Panel. He is also a professor at Geisinger Commonwealth School of Medicine and an adjunct professor of biomedical informatics at Ohio State University and the University of Utah.