Habits and Hacks with Dionna W. Williams, PhD

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Photo of Dionna Williams, PhD, of Johns Hopkins Medicine
Dr. Williams

Dionna W. Williams, PhD, joins us for an engaging chat about the habits and hacks that have been key to her success in academic medicine this week on the Faculty Factory Podcast. Today’s show is packed with some great insight on grant writing, strategic planning, and networking.

Dr. Williams serves as assistant Professor in the Department of Molecular and Comparative Pathobiology with Johns Hopkins Medicine in Baltimore.

We will definitely be welcoming Dr. Williams back for another episode exclusively dedicated to grant writing. As you’ll learn on today’s show, she is quite the expert in this critical tool of our trade.

When it comes to planning, life happens, and plans get messed up. Dr. Williams told us that it’s important to accept the fact something has happened to mess the plan up, and then recalibrate. The new focus should be to figure out the best way to pivot to a new plan and march forward.

How to avoid some common networking mistakes is another valuable takeaway from today’s show. As Dr. Williams reminds us, no one enjoys networking when it is “icky” and unauthentic.

Networking can be very uncomfortable because there are folks out there that simply just don’t seem to get it. As Dr. Williams and I discussed on today’s show, it’s important to be genuine when networking.

“Having a genuine connection, or trying to establish that connection, has been my way to network in a way that is comfortable and doesn’t feel icky to me,” she said.

Make sure to listen to the entire episode by utilizing the podcast player above. If you’d like to listen to more episodes later, you can visit our Podcast homepage.