Professor David Williams is the Florence Sprague Norman and Laura Smart Norman Professor of Public Health at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and Professor of African and African American Studies and Sociology at Harvard University. He holds an MPH from Loma Linda University and a PhD in Sociology from the University of Michigan. Professor Williams is an internationally recognised social scientist focused on social influences on health. His research has enhanced our understanding of the complex ways in which socioeconomic status, race, stress, racism, health behaviour and religious involvement can affect health. The Everyday Discrimination Scale that he developed is one of the most widely used measures of discrimination in health studies. Professor Williams has also been involved in the development of health policy at the national level in the U.S. He has played a visible, national leadership role in raising awareness levels of the problem of health inequalities and identifying interventions to address them. Professor Williams has served on the National Committee on Vital and Health Statistics and on eight committees for the National Academy of Medicine, including the committee that prepared the Unequal Treatment report.

Dr Naomi Priest received her PhD in 2009 in population health at the University of Melbourne. She then completed a National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) post-doctoral fellowship 2010-2014 also at the University of Melbourne with training in social epidemiology. In 2014-15 she was a Visiting Scientist at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. She was recently awarded a NHMRC Career Development Fellowship (2017-2020) to continue her work on How does early life adversity “get under the skin” to influence lifelong health? – Identifying opportunities for prevention among Aboriginal and ethnic minority peoples.