Rate My Professor Grettel Williams

Grettel Williams serves as the POPO Manager at Va’a o Tautai – Centre for Pacific Health within the Division of Health Sciences at the University of Otago. Born and raised in Hawkes Bay, New Zealand, she has made Dunedin her home. Williams holds a Bachelor of Science, a Postgraduate Diploma in Public Health, and a Master of Public Health, all from the University of Otago. She joined the Centre in 2018 as an academic administrator. In 2021, she advanced to Programme Coordinator for Mentoring, coordinating the POPO mentoring and outreach programmes to support Pacific students in health sciences. In her current role, she manages all student support services through the Pacific Opportunities Programme (POPO), established in 2011 in partnership with Te Whatu Ora. POPO provides academic, cultural, social, and peer mentoring, along with a paid 10-week national internship for penultimate-year students, aiding their entry into the health workforce.

Williams' research focuses on Pacific health workforce development. Her 2023 Master of Public Health thesis, supervised by Richard Egan and Rose Richards at the Social and Behavioural Research Unit, titled 'Building a health workforce that can meet the health needs of Pacific communities: Perspectives from leaders and health care providers of Pacific health services across New Zealand,' incorporated Talanoa and Kakala methodologies to strengthen university-Pacific health provider partnerships and enhance the Pacific health curriculum. She contributed a published abstract on this topic to the Pacific Voices XVI proceedings (2019) with Richards and Egan. In 2022, she co-presented 'The grind never stops: Lessons learned from the COVID-19 impact on the POPO Programmes' at the University of Otago's COVID-19 symposium. Under her management, POPO earned the Pacific Service Excellence Award at the 2024 Sunpix Pacific Peoples Awards for advancing Pacific student success and the health workforce.