Jason Williams

Jason Williams is a Senior Research Public Health Analyst at RTI with over 20 years of experience developing, translating, and using advanced statistical methods in applied research. Much of Dr. Williams’s work has focused on evaluation of small and large-scale substance use and violence prevention programs concentrating on at-risk populations, especially children, adolescents, and military personnel.

He has served as analysis task lead and primary analyst and methodologist for multiple community and school-based evaluations. These include Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA)-funded evaluations of the Safe Schools/Healthy Students program, the National Evaluation of SAMHSA’s Homeless Programs, and the Program Evaluation for Prevention Contract (PEPC) evaluation of the Strategic Prevention Framework for States for Prescription Drugs. Other evaluations include the current National Institute of Justice (NIJ) evaluation of Project Safe Neighborhoods, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC’s) Prescription Drug Overdose Prevention for State program, and a past iteration of PEPC. Dr. Williams has also led analyses for several iterations of the Department of Defense’s (DoD’s) Survey of Health Related Behaviors in both the Active Duty and Reserve Components and evaluated multiple programs aimed at stress reduction and readiness promotion, violence prevention, and substance use prevention trials in the military.

In addition to program evaluation, he has worked extensively with studies examining child and youth development and the impact of risk and protective factors on important outcomes. Dr. Williams was an analyst for the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development and has assisted with several National Survey of Child and Adolescent Well-Being projects in the past. He is a collaborator with the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Environmental Influences on Child Health Outcomes project, modeling the impact of early child experiences on later health outcomes and immune response. Recently, Dr. Williams was lead statistician on two projects examining the impact of programs for families involved with the child welfare system, studying differences in recurrence of family involvement and permanent placement of involved children. He has acted as lead psychometrician for a U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) project developing an international toolkit for the measurement of child experiences of gender-based violence and attitudes in the community, home, and school.

Dr. Williams has methodological expertise in mediation analysis, psychometrics, missing data techniques, bootstrapping, multilevel models, structural equation modeling, longitudinal growth models, and other latent variable models, such as factor analysis and latent class analysis.