Roberta G Williams MD
Professor and Past Chairman, Department of Pediatrics, Keck School of Medicine, University of Southern California and Heart Institute, Children’s Hospital Los AngelesAs Chief of Pediatric Cardiology at UCLA, Dr. Williams participated with Dr. Joseph Perloff in the Ahmanson Adult Congenital Heart Program and worked within the ACC on issues important to lifelong care of congenital heart disease: access to quality care, education, and advocacy. Then, as Chair of Pediatrics at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, she continued efforts to define the needs of the adult congenital heart disease (ACHD) population by co-chairing an American College of Cardiology Bethesda Conference on the Adult with Congenital Heart Disease and subsequently chairing a consensus panel for NHLBI, NIH on research needs for the ACHD population. She was recruited to the position of Chair of Pediatrics at the University of Southern California and Vice-President for Pediatrics and Academic Affairs at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles in 2000. Having observed that there are two critical periods where hand-offs of care represent challenges for patients with chronic childhood disease- fetal-to-neonatal and adolescent-to-young adult transitions, she first established a highly successful maternal-fetal medicine program and subsequently applied the same multidisciplinary model to a program for transition to adult healthcare, aimed at a large population of youth who are both medically and socially vulnerable. She is currently studying cost and health outcomes of adolescents and young adults with chronic disease as they transfer from pediatric to adult health systems with a continuing career goal of refining strategies and evaluating these advances.