Dr. Williams grew up in Johnson City, TN, and graduated summa cum laude from Wake Forest University with a BA in Religion. He attended medical school at the University of Tennessee in Memphis, followed by Med/Peds residency at Baystate Medical Center / Tufts University in Springfield, Massachusetts. After completing an additional year as Pediatric Chief Resident at Baystate, he went on to become the founding member of the Pediatric Hospital Medicine group at Baystate Children’s Hospital in 2007, and was later promoted to Division Chief for Pediatric Hospital Medicine.

In 2011, Dr. Williams took a year-long academic sabbatical to pursue his passion for Global Health.  After obtaining a Diploma in Tropical Medicine in Liverpool, England, he spent several months as a volunteer Pediatrician at Redemption Hospital in Monrovia, Liberia, where he continued working with resident physicians before the West African Ebola outbreak of 2014.  Additionally, he was the founding co-chair of the Global Health subsection of Pediatric Hospital Medicine for the American Academy of Pediatrics in 2015.

In 2016, Dr. Williams served as the Division Chief for Pediatric Hospital Medicine at East Tennessee State University and Niswonger Children's Hospital. He joined the University of Louisville faculty in 2019 and was selected to serve as the interim division chief of international pediatrics in 2022 and has been formally appointed the division chief and Humana Endowed Chair for International Pediatrics, effective July 1, 2023.

Dr. Williams is keenly interested in resident education, tropical medicine, and global health.  His current global health efforts involve leading projects to enhance pediatric care in Tamale, Ghana, as part of the AMPATH consortium, which the University of Louisville officially joined in July 2023 under Dr. Williams’s leadership.