Dr. Ann Williams is the VCHAP Nurse Training Specialist based in New Haven, Connecticut. She joined the project in March 2004.

Dr. Williams is the Jayne Professor of Nursing at Yale School of Nursing, Professor of Medicine at Yale School of Medicine, Director of the Yale Center for International Nursing Scholarship and Education, and Chair of Programs for the Board of the Yale-China Association. She is also a Guest Professor in the Department of Nursing at Xiangya Medical University, Central South University, Changsha, China.

After receiving a bachelor of arts in history, she received a nursing diploma from Illinois Masonic Medical Center, a master of science in nursing from Yale University, and a doctorate in education from Columbia University. As a Robert Wood Johnson Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of California, San Francisco, she conducted one of the first epidemiologic studies of human papillomavirus infection in women with HIV. In 1991, she was inducted as a Fellow in the American Academy of Nurses, and, in 2002, she received the Ruth B. Freeman Award for Distinguished Career in Public Health Nursing from the American Public Health Nursing Association.

She has more than two decades of experience in HIV/AIDS research. She designed and conducted some of the earliest studies of risk behaviors among injection drug users and their sexual partners. Her work tested interventions to reduce HIV transmission, improve the health status of women with HIV, and increase patient adherence to antiretroviral medication. Her current research focuses on understanding the social and behavioral aspects of medication adherence among HIV-infected persons and on designing and evaluating theory-based interventions to assist patients in improving their success with antiretroviral medications. This work is underway in New Haven, CT, and in Hunan Province, China.

Dr. Williams co-edited a book on HIV Nursing which received a Best Books of 1998 award from the American Journal of Nursing. In 1999 and again in 2005, the Association of Nurses in AIDS Care recognized her work with an award for Research Article of the Year. Dr. Williams has extensive experience in community-based behavioral clinical trials and in international training and collaboration. She maintains an active clinical practice at an inner city HIV/AIDS clinic.