Christopher Williams, M.D., Ph.D., is an Associate Professor of Medicine. His research interests focus on understanding how epithelial wound healing responses promote cancer development. His laboratory studies a recently discovered tight junction protein called BVES, and have determined that BVES is suppressed in colon cancer and that this promotes the spread of cancer. His research program is structured at determining how BVES promotes metastasis with the goal being to develop therapeutics to block metastasis.

Dr. Williams received a Bachelor’s Degree (1992) from Brigham Young University. He enrolled in the Medical Scientist Training Program (MSTP) at Vanderbilt University in 1994 and matriculated with a doctorate in Cell Biology and Medicine in 2002. He received the Albert Weinstein Prize in Medicine and elected the ABIM Research Pathway for a Medicine Residency, completing a residency in Medicine and Fellowship in Gastroenterology in 2007. Prior to that, he performed a post-doctoral fellowship in Dr. Scott Hiebert’s laboratory in the Department of Biochemistry at Vanderbilt University. He joined the faculty at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine July of 2007 as an Assistant Professor in Medicine and Cancer Biology and is a Staff Gastroenterologist at the VA Medical Center affiliated with Vanderbilt University Medical Center.