Dr. Monnica T. Williams is a board-certified clinical psychologist, professor, author, speaker, and Canada Research Chair in Mental Health Innovation and Equity at the University of Ottawa. With over 200 peer-reviewed publications and several influential books examining racial trauma, microaggressions, and mental health, Dr. Williams has devoted her career to advancing equity-driven research and clinical practice.
Beyond academia, her commitment to accessible science communication and community engagement has brought her work to national and international platforms, including CNN, the New York Times, Toronto Star, and Red Table Talk.
We had the privilege of speaking with Dr. Williams about her research journey, lived experiences in the field, and her reflections on diversity and inclusion within psychology graduate training programs.
JOURNEY TO A PROFESSIONAL CAREER IN CLINICAL PSYCHOLOGY
At the beginning of her career, Dr. Williams studied Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), taking no psychology courses. However, her role on the Committee for Educational Policy—where she helped survey students about their educational experiences—provided her first exposure to research rooted in human behaviour and well-being. This experience sparked a growing curiosity about psychology and the ways systems shape individual outcomes.
Seeking a more direct engagement with the field, Dr. Williams went on to complete undergraduate studies in Psychology at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) and later pursued her Doctorate at the University of Virginia in Clinical Psychology. During her clinical training, Dr. Williams gained an interest in health disparities when she noticed that measures assessing psychopathology had not been validated across different cultural and ethnic groups. One pivotal moment came when she discovered that a widely used self-report measure for obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) disproportionately flagged Black individuals as having OCD, despite not meeting diagnostic criteria outlined in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition (APA, 2022). These early observations planted the foundation for her later work examining racial bias, assessment inequities, and culturally responsive mental health care.
Her commitment to addressing systemic inequities only deepened during her clinical internship at the Montreal General Hospital, where she observed firsthand how patients of colour were often met with biased assumptions and unequal treatment. She shared that “patients of colour weren’t getting the same treatment and were getting prejudicial assumptions [made] about them that were more to do with biases held by clinicians than with their own realities” (Dr. Williams). These experiences strengthened her resolve to improve mental health care access, assessment, and treatment for marginalized communities.
Today, through her leadership of the Culture and Mental Health and Disparities Lab at the University of Ottawa, Dr. Williams focuses not only on documenting mental health disparities but on interrogating the systems that produce them. As she explains, much of her work moves beyond identifying inequities to asking, “What are we as clinicians doing that may be contributing to these problems—and how can we change it?”
MOVEMENTS TO ADDRESS DIVERSITY IN CLINICAL PSYCHOLOGY PROGRAMS
With over six years of living and working in Canada, Dr. Williams began to notice the lack of diversity across the field of psychology. Curious about the scope of the issue, she tried a basic online search and reached out to various institutions to find the number of Black, Indigenous, and People of Colour (BIPOC) faculty members and graduate students in psychology programs across Ontario. After countless hours of searching, she found… Nothing. There was no centralised or publicly available demographic data.
How can we say there’s a lack of diversity in psychology graduate programs without concrete data to show how severe the problem really is? How can we fix a problem we can’t measure or clearly identify? Motivated by this gap, Dr. Williams decided to take it upon herself, along with her colleagues, to find this information. Through an extensive review of institutional websites and careful deliberation about faculty racial identification, they created a comprehensive chart to capture the true scope of underrepresentation. The results of their research were later published in their article Out of sight, out of mind: Underrepresentation of racialized faculty in Canadian Psychology (Faber, 2025). Shockingly, across 23 major universities and colleges in Ontario, 1244 faculty members in psychology were White, while only 168 were identified as BIPOC faculty members.
Why is this a problem? Importantly, Dr. Williams had already begun unpacking the structural roots of these disparities in earlier work. In the article, Lions at the gate: How weaponization of policy prevents people of colour from becoming professional psychologists in Canada (Faber, 2023), she and her colleagues examined how regulatory boards, admission criteria, and professional organizations have perpetuated racist exclusion through policy. They shed light on how these systems, though often framed as neutral, continue to produce racist outcomes that restrict access to education and professional training for people of colour, thus identifying the cause for the discrepancy among BIPOC psychology students and faculty across Ontario. This work was particularly influential as it garnered a response from the Canadian Psychological Association in their article Canadian Psychological Association’s comment on Faber et al.’s (2023) “Lions at the gate: How weaponization of policy prevents people of colour from becoming professional psychologists in Canada” (Canadian Psychological Association, 2025).
With all this work highlighting the barriers there are for BIPOC students in Canadian psychology programs, and the lack of diversity across faculty members in psychology, what’s next? How do we address these issues? Well, there’s no need to worry, Dr. Williams had already outlined ways for institutions to ensure that psychology graduate programs address these issues in her recently published article Ensuring effective commitment to racial, ethnic, and cultural diversity in professional psychology graduate programmes (Williams, 2025). In this article, she addresses ways that institutions can change admissions criteria and policies to ensure diversity across their psychology graduate programs.
With this growing body of research highlighting both systemic barriers and the stark lack of faculty diversity, the natural question has now become: what now? How do institutions move from awareness to action? A question that Dr. Williams had already begun working on.
In her recent article Ensuring effective commitment to racial, ethnic, and cultural diversity in professional psychology graduate programmes (Williams, 2025), she offers concrete recommendations for reforming admissions policies, accountability structures, and institutional practices to foster genuine inclusion.
With all of this work, you might be asking yourself, how is this important? How does research like this enact change? Work done by Dr. Williams’ and other advocate researchers ensures that regulatory boards, institutions and policymakers are confronted with evidence of how current systems exclude BIPOC students and professionals. By making inequities visible and traceable to policy decisions, work like hers pressures institutions to move beyond performative commitments and toward meaningful reform. Although significant barriers remain, Dr. Williams continues to advocate tirelessly for a psychology workforce that is more inclusive, equitable, and representative of the communities it serves for generations to come.
GENERAL TIPS FOR GETTING INTO PSYCHOLOGY GRADUATE PROGRAMS
Dr. Williams mentioned, identifying mentors who you are interested in, finding out if they are doing work that is a good fit for you, and talking to people in the lab to see what kind of environment it is. These are essential steps in navigating graduate applications and determining if a lab is a good fit for you.
However, she cautions that even doing everything “right” does not guarantee admission. The reality is that opportunities are limited, particularly for students from marginalized backgrounds, so sometimes flexibility becomes necessary. As such, she emphasised the importance of building a strong support network of peers and mentors who understand the process, finding allies who can offer encouragement and advocacy, and preparing for challenges while remembering that systemic barriers are not personal failures.
It’s going to be a slugfest at times,
but it is worth it when you get to the other side
(Dr. Williams)
Special thanks to Dr. Monnica Williams for sharing her insights into her work and psychology graduate programs!
REFERENCES
Canadian Psychological Association. (2025). Canadian Psychological Association’s comment on Faber et al.’s (2023) “Lions at the gate: How weaponization of policy prevents people of colour from becoming professional psychologists in Canada”. Canadian Psychology / Psychologie Canadienne. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1037/cap0000434
Faber, S. C., Strauss, D., Dasgupta, A., & Williams, M. T. (2025). Out of sight, out of mind: Underrepresentation of racialized faculty in Canadian psychology. Academia Mental Health and Well-Being, 2(2). https://doi.org/10.20935/MHealthWellB7762
Faber, S. C., Williams, M. T., Metzger, I. W., MacIntyre, M. M., Strauss, D., Duniya, C. G., Sawyer, K., Cénat, J. M., & Goghari, V. M. (2023). Lions at the gate: How weaponization of policy prevents people of colour from becoming professional psychologists in Canada. Canadian Psychology / Psychologie Canadienne, 64(4), 335–354. https://doi.org/10.1037/cap0000352
Williams, M. T., Madsen, J., Fontanilla, C. C., & Faber, S. (2025). Ensuring effective commitment to racial, ethnic, and cultural diversity in professional psychology graduate programmes. Canadian Psychology / Psychologie Canadienne. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1037/cap0000447