Janet Williams

Healthcare Education

Professor of Biology, Elms College

She Has Impacted Generations of Young Healthcare Professionals

Janet Williams

Janet Williams traces her interest in biology back to animal care — specifically, horses, which she had as a child.

“And when you have horses, you have to know how to take care of them,” she noted. “So I got involved with 4-H in New Jersey, and they have a big emphasis on horse care and knowing everything about the anatomy and physiology of the horse — knowing about their nutrition, knowing some basic veterinary care. I had a lot of background in that.”

It was something she kept with her when she first majored in journalism in college — and found she was bored. “So I decided to switch to biology. And that was hard because I didn’t have any science background. I did struggle for a while, but then I really liked it and decided to go to graduate school.”

She has one caveat regarding her love for biology, though.

“I would definitely say, ever since I was young, I am a squeamish biologist. I don’t get sick or anything; I just don’t like some things. I like things that don’t bleed, scream, or throw up. In my career, I’ve had to do things like teach anatomy and physiology where there’s a lot of dissections. I’ve had to work with a lot of live animals and do studies, which I’ve not particularly liked doing, through my degrees.

“But after I finished my PhD, I pretty much switched just to molecular work, where everything’s in a test tube and very tiny and there’s nothing that looks really biological,” she added. “It’s much more like chemistry.”

In graduate school, however, Williams did some intriguing work with chickens and the autoimmune disorders vitiligo and alopecia areata; the principal investigator on that project teamed up with a group from Harvard University that was doing work on both vitiligo and alopecia in humans.

“I did a lot of experiments to try to find out whether the tendency to lose pigment was something to do with the immune system or something to do with the genetics of the bird. It turns out that it was a cross between both of them,” she said. “That was fun.”

Other intriguing graduate-school projects followed, notably in the molecular realm, including cloning experiments and DNA-sequencing experiments, before she finished her PhD in zoology at UMass Amherst, where she also earned a Distinguished Teaching Award for the instruction that was part of her doctoral work.

After that, Williams did post-doctoral work with a company called New England Biolabs, where her work with enzymes earned three U.S. patents with the company. During almost a decade there, she got to work with Richard Roberts, who earned a Nobel Prize in the mid-1990s.

“It was quite an honor working there with him; he was a very interesting man,” she told BusinessWest. “I even have a publication with him, so that was really cool too. Then I got married, and New England Biolabs was about two and a half hours away, so I couldn’t stay there. But Elms College had a position open, so I came here and taught anatomy and physiology and genetics.”

That was 30 years ago, and she hasn’t looked back.

“It was really fun. I’ve always enjoyed teaching, and you don’t get to teach very much when you’re doing research,” she said. “So it was really fun to get back into the classroom again.”

More importantly, Williams has been able to implement new academic programs and generally influence students moving through the college’s well-regarded nursing and health-science majors, while also connecting them with area employers and boosting the region’s healthcare workforce.

“Janet is innovative, always reaching out to our local healthcare industries to see how Elms can better serve the community.”

“During her tenure at Elms College, Janet has embodied the health-sciences program at Elms,” said Julie Beck, dean of the School of Nursing. “She teaches biology, which extends itself to other health-related fields, such as pre-med, physician assistant, pre-PT/OT, and pre-chiropractic studies. Janet is innovative, always reaching out to our local healthcare industries to see how Elms can better serve the community.”

As a professor with impact — three decades worth — Williams certainly merits being chosen as this year’s Healthcare Hero in the category of Education.

Into the Real World

Williams approaches her role with a sense of gratitude for being able to shepherd and mentor students as others did for her during her college and early-career years.

“There’s a huge difference between my previous position as a research scientist and being in academia, being a faculty member, and teaching and mentoring students — it’s very, very different,” she said. “But at the end of every day, I feel great because some student has probably come up to me and said, ‘I never understood that, and today I understand it.’ Or they tell you something exciting; maybe they got a letter and have been accepted somewhere. It’s the greatest feeling, and you feel like every win for them is a win for you.

Janet Williams calls herself a “squeamish biologist” who prefers molecular work over, say, dissections.

“But then, every time they are struggling, you’re struggling with that too — especially when you know that they’re a great person and they’d be a great doctor and you feel like they just need a chance, and you just hope somebody opens the door for them,” she went on. “But they find their way. Sometimes medical school might be the pie-in-the-sky goal, but some of them find they may need to think about something else — maybe dental school, or podiatry, or physician assistant … there are so many wonderful options out there. That’s the thing about this kind of path — there are many different ways they can go from it.”

Since most of her students are going into some branch of healthcare, she became the pre-med advisor as well.

“I had to show students the pathway of how you get from an undergrad program into an MD or DO program, or chiropractic, or pharmacy, or physician assistant, or dental school, or veterinary school,” she explained, adding that, around 2008, she started something called the post-baccalaureate pre-medical program.

“That’s kind of an odd program. It’s where students have already gotten a bachelor’s degree — they might have studied pre-med, or they might have studied something else. So they could either retake courses that they’ve already taken to get better grades and to understand it better, or maybe they majored in English and didn’t have any pre-med prerequisites, so they are taking those courses for the first time.”

That program has drawn students who graduated from places like Amherst College, Princeton University, and other schools where they didn’t study in the medical field, but wanted to expand their career options.

“Those students would do well in our classes, and then they would take the MCAT, do well, and go off to medical school. It was really exciting because, all of a sudden, we were bringing these students from all over the place — not just the Northeast, but California, Florida, Texas, Uganda, China, you name it. It was amazing.”

More recently, she launched master’s programs in biomedical sciences and biotechnology, which many students have taken on their way to medical, dental, veterinary, or physician assistant (PA) programs.

Many Elms students also receive clinical training at the region’s many hospitals and other institutions, and Williams has helped forge those connections over the years.

“A student really can’t get into medical school or dental school or PA or anything without having experience with patients,” she said. “It’s great because you get paid, but you’re also learning, which supports your career goals. We’ve had a lot of students do that; this area has been fantastic supporting our students in their progression.”

“It was really exciting because, all of a sudden, we were bringing these students from all over the place — not just the Northeast, but California, Florida, Texas, Uganda, China, you name it. It was amazing.”

More recently — in the past year, in fact — Elms also launched a phlebotomy class. “This is where students learn how to do blood draws. We’ve had a lot of interest from not only our students who want to be pre-meds, but also the nursing students, because the nursing students find that, if they have this skill, they’ll be a little bit more valuable and a little bit more marketable.”

An EKG certification course may be on the horizon as well. All these efforts, Williams noted, translates into strengthening the local healthcare workforce.

“Interestingly enough, some of our students that have come here all the way from California stay here. They don’t even want to go back. They like the Northeast.

“We’re also very fortunate that, in this local area, we have a lot of physician-assistant programs. We have Assumption, Springfield College, Westfield State, St. Joseph’s down in Hartford, and also Bay Path, which has accepted a lot of our students. That’s been really good, too, because there are so many local opportunities for students to get into PA programs. And then we’ve had a lot of students interested in medical school.”

Giving the Full Picture

One advantage to studying at Elms, Williams said, is access to ethics courses through Dr. Peter DePergola, whose many titles at the college center around bioethics, religious studies, and medical humanities, and who was honored as a Healthcare Hero himself in 2018.

“So many of our students take classes with him, and they learn so much from him. And that is such a critical aspect of really doing well in healthcare,” she said. “He just rolls out a scenario and puts you right into the difficulties of understanding the ethics and concerns of a situation, which is a great thing for students because it’s going to happen to them when they’re out there practicing medicine.”

But there are many, many other challenges in healthcare, and Williams doesn’t sugarcoat them.

“I’m the devil’s advocate. I try to paint the worst possible picture for the students so that they really understand what they’re getting into, because medicine isn’t easy,” she told BusinessWest. “We’re not just talking about the academic part of it; we’re talking about the other parts — working with people in healthcare is not easy. Veterinary is even probably harder because you’re not only working with people, but you’re working with people and their animals, so that’s that’s really a difficult field, and not everybody has insurance to cover the bad things that happen to their animals.

“So I’m trying to breathe a little reality into students so that they don’t just see medicine as what we see on TV,” she went on. “That’s also what’s nice about getting them out to volunteer or work in some of our local practices, because they’re really seeing it; they see the struggles they’ll face in healthcare and medicine.”

But Williams believes in the opportunity for the right person to make a difference in healthcare, whether it’s locally or far beyond Massachusetts. Beck, in nominating her, called her a “valued asset” at the college — and much more: a truly impactful Healthcare Hero.

“I do really love working with students every day,” Williams said. “When you get to work with students every day, they always bring something to you. The students have been really amazing.”