Tay Gavin Erickson Lecture Series—Dr. David R. Williams is internationally recognized as a leading social scientist, enhancing the understanding of the complex ways in which race, racial discrimination, socioeconomic status and religious involvement can affect physical and mental health. The Everyday Discrimination scale that he developed is currently one of the most widely used measures. He is the author of more than 300 scholarly papers in scientific journals and edited collections and has played a visible, national leadership role in raising awareness levels of the problem of health disparities.

Dr. Williams directed the South African Stress and Health Study, the first nationally representative study of the prevalence and correlates of psychiatric disorders in sub-Sahara Africa. He was also a key member of the team that conducted the National Study of American Life, the largest study of mental health disorders in the African American population in the U.S. and the first health study to include a large national sample of Blacks of Caribbean ancestry.

This lecture is co-sponsored by the UMass Center for Research on Families' Tay Gavin Erickson Lecture Series,  the 2012-13 Clinical Psychology Diversity Speaker Series (awarded a 2012 APA CEMRRAT Implementation Grants Fund (IGF) for Ethnic Minority Recruitment, Retention and Training in Psychology), the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences, the Psychology Department Research Mentoring Group Speaker Series which is supported by the UMass Amherst Center for Teaching & Faculty Development's Mutual Mentoring Initiative, funded by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Department of Public Health in the School of Public Health and Health Sciences and the Western MA Public Health Training Center.

This lecture is sponsored by the Center for Research on Families’ Tay Gavin Erickson Lecture Series. The Center for Research on Families (CRF) is an endowed interdisciplinary research center in the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences and College of Natural Sciences at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. The Tay Gavin Erickson Lecture Series brings internationally recognized speakers with expertise in family research to campus each year. The lecture series began in 1999 through an endowment established in memory of Tay Gavin Erickson.