Speaker: Carla D Williams, PhD & Florencia Gonzalez, MPH

Carla Williams serves as Associate Professor of Medicine and Public Health at Howard University and Director of the Howard University Cancer Center. She leads community engagement for our Georgetown Howard Universities Center for Clinical and Translational Science for the Howard University Research Centers in Minority Institutions and co-leads the Howard-Georgetown Collaborative Partnership in Cancer Research.  Her discipline-spanning, community-engaged, and collaborative research has been supported by NCATS, NIMHD, NCI, NIDDK, CDC, the DC Department of Health and several foundations with a sustained focus on the combined goals of reducing health disparities, engaging communities and building teams to improve population health. Her talk will discuss the benefits and challenges of collecting and using expanded demographic measures of individual identity and area-level measures to enhance the precision, rigor and translation of clinical and translational research to better promote health equity.
Florencia Gonzalez is Director for the Inclusion of Diverse Populations Core under GHUCCTS.  She specializes in supporting research teams with strategic planning for inclusion of underrepresented groups in health research. She also leads efforts to promote equitable inclusion of people with limited English proficiency (LEP) in studies.