Faculty Profile

BIO

Francesca (FW) Williamson, PhD (she/her) is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Learning Health Sciences at the University of Michigan Medical School. She is an interdisciplinary social scientist and qualitative methodologist by training, specializing in social interactional research, equitable learning systems, and health equity. FW leads the HEiRS Lab, a research collective investigating how real-world health, learning, and research practices and processes enable or hinder equity and justice within and beyond learning health systems. She uses multiple methods and ethnomethodology/ conversation analysis approaches to study interactions in various health contexts. Most recently, she has studied healthcare interactions in pediatric oncology and urology settings, focusing on decision-making and disease evaluation activities that elicit or warrant significant emotional responses, hesitance, distrust, or decisional dilemmas. FW is currently a Putnam Scholar with the Academy of Communication in Healthcare. Her primary goal is to forward research and praxis to advance more humanizing, healing interactions, systems of care, and futures.

FW holds a BS from Washington State University and a PhD from Indiana University, Bloomington. She was a postdoctoral fellow at the Butler University Center for Urban Ecology and Sustainability (2021).

She is a faculty associate of the Research Center for Group Dynamics at the Institute for Social Research.