Grace Williams

Health Informatics Researcher at Ochsner Health

Speaker

Grace Lord Williams, PhD is a Health Informaticist at Ochsner Health and serves as a Strategic Research Partnership Liaison with innovation incubators such as the New Orleans BioInnovation Center, where she specializes in building high-impact collaborations between health systems, startups, and academic institutions to accelerate translational research. Her work is centered on overcoming the “valley of death” in healthcare innovation by developing structured partnership models that streamline clinical validation, align stakeholders, provide rigorous research structure, and reduce time from concept to patient impact.

With formal training as a Bioinformaticist, Dr. Grace Lord Williams brings expertise in machine learning and artificial intelligence validation within real-world clinical settings. Her technical background supports the design and execution of rigorous, data-driven studies across diverse therapeutic areas, including oncology, transplantation, immunogenetics, infectious disease, and clinical syndromes, with a focus on ensuring scalable and equitable deployment of emerging technologies. In her role, she acts as a principal investigator across multi-stakeholder initiatives, coordinating startups, clinicians, executives, and funding partners to efficiently advance innovation through regulatory, operational, and clinical pathways. She has led and supported multiple funded collaborations by preparing early-stage companies for health system integration.

Dr. Grace Lord Williams also holds an academic appointment as Adjunct Assistant Professor and contributes to education in biomedical informatics, outcomes research, and translational science at multiple institutions. Her work reflects a commitment to building sustainable innovation ecosystems that enable faster validation, stronger partnerships, and measurable clinical impact particularly in historically underserved regions.