Lela Williams PhD

Lela Rankin Williams is an associate professor and the associate director of the School of Social Work, Tucson. She is also a faculty affiliate and investigator with the Southwest Interdisciplinary Research Center and a faculty affiliate with Family Studies and Human Development at the University of Arizona.

Williams’ scholarship focuses on preventive interventions for children and families, particularly in vulnerable populations. She has established strong community partnerships that have led to the development, implementation, and management of several federally funded intervention studies. Williams has expertise in longitudinal and intensive-repeated-measure designs, using surveys, observational, and qualitative methods for immigrant Mexican mothers, adolescent mothers, and mothers with newborns born opioid-exposed. In addition, her scholarship is innovative and prolific; she has produced more than 50 peer-reviewed publications in high impact journals. Both locally and internationally, she is regarded as the spokesperson on using infant carriers as a tool to enhance parenting and promote infant development, reaching several media outlets and international speaking engagements.

Williams teaches human behavior and the social environment and clinical practice courses with adolescents.

Williams has interdisciplinary training in psychology and family studies and human development. She was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Maryland and Temple University and earned her doctorate from the University of Arizona.