Arthur Williams

Arthur Robin Williams, MD, MBE

Assistant Professor, Clinical Psychiatry, Columbia University Division on Substance Use Disorders
Research Scientist, New York State Psychiatric Institute

Dr. Williams is Assistant Professor of Clinical Psychiatry, Columbia University Division on Substance Use Disorders, and Research Scientist, New York State Psychiatric Institute.  He attended Princeton University's School of Public and International Affairs for his undergraduate degree in domestic health policy, completed his medical degree at the University of Pennsylvania where he also earned a Master in Bioethics. He completed psychiatry training at NYU-Bellevue, and a NIDA funded T32 research fellowship in Addiction Psychiatry at Columbia.

Dr. Williams is the PI of a NIDA K23, NIDA R21, NIDA CTN 00112, and a SAMHSA ORN grant. He also has his first R01 under resubmission to NIDA currently to be scored this Fall. His K23 addresses the addiction treatment gap through the development of an OUD Cascade of Care. His work on the Cascade has been invited as expert testimony to the NIH HEAL Initiative twice, NIH HEAL JCOIN, NIDA CTN, APA, SAMHSA CSAT, Pew Charitable Trusts, and IBM Watson Health. For this work, he has been awarded the APA Health Services Researcher of the Year, Early Career Scholar (2019) and was appointed to the APA Committee on Quality and Performance Measurement. His R21 is entitled, “Medical Marijuana Program Participation and Changes in Controlled Substance Use” and he was recently invited by the Annals of Internal Medicine to author a feature article on cannabis best practices. He has published ~25 first and senior authored publications and book chapters addressing the opioid epidemic, cannabis, and health policy.

Dr. Williams serves on the APA Expert Work Group: quality of life outcomes for SUD treatment, facilitated by Mathematica (2019), the APA Technical Expert Panel: quality measure development for OUD with NCQA (2019-2021), and on a National Quality Forum (NQF) opioid measure development group (2019-2020). His service to New York includes membership on the OASAS Medical Advisory Panel, the OASAS Addiction Designation Task Force, the NYC DOHMH PDMP Advisory Group funded by the CDC, and he is the Director of the New York chapter of AAAP. In addition to this national and state service, he co-directs the Division’s Fellows didactics course, supports colleagues through work on their DSMBs and supplement submissions, developed the CUIMC SBIRT curriculum for medical and dental students through a SAMSHA grant and more recently the NYP housestaff-wide opioid epidemic training curriculum, and teaches med students, residents, and supervises regularly.