Drew FK Williamson, MD

PRINCIPAL INVESTIGATOR | drew.williamson@emory.edu

Drew is a pathologist, board certified in Anatomic Pathology and Molecular Genetic Pathology with a clinical practice in the interpretation of next generation sequencing panels for cancer patients. He completed a BA in Mathematics at Oberlin College and an MD at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine. His clinical training was residency in Anatomic Pathology at Brigham and Women’s Hospital followed by fellowships in Molecular Genetic Pathology and Clinical Informatics at Mass General Brigham. His clinical training was followed by postdoctoral research in the lab of Faisal Mahmood, PhD at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School. The focus of his postdoctoral work was the training and evaluation of foundation models for pathology, culminating in three co-first author manuscripts published in Nature Medicine and one in Nature.


Drew is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine at the Emory University School of Medicine and has appointments in the Emory/GA Tech Departments of Biomedical Informatics and Biomedical Engineering, and at the Winship Cancer Institute. He is also an Associate Faculty Researcher in the Emory Empathetic AI for Health Institute.

Lab Members

  • Biniam Garomsa

    PhD Student

    Biniam is a Computer Science and Informatics PhD student at Emory University. He is interested in developing imaging, natural language processing, and multimodal machine learning methods to improve cancer patient outcomes. Biniam previously conducted medical AI research in the Advanced Computing and Oncology group at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center and in the AI in Medicine Program at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. He contributed to published studies including the development of a brain MRI foundation model and a longitudinal risk prediction model for pediatric cancer. Biniam holds a B.S. in Interdisciplinary Data Science from Duke University and Duke Kunshan University. He is co-supervised by Dr. Judy Gichoya.

  • Zechary Chou

    Masters Student

    Zechary Chou is a graduate student in Computer Science at Emory University’s Laney Graduate School. He earned dual undergraduate degrees in Biology (B.S.) and Computer Science (B.A.) from Emory University. His research interests lie at the intersection of artificial intelligence, biology, and medicine. His current work focuses on deploying and evaluating multimodal and unimodal computational foundation models in pathology to ensure robust performance across diverse datasets.

  • Thomas Benissan

    Undergraduate Student

    Thomas Benissan is an undergraduate student at Emory University studying Computer Science and Applied Mathematics. He is interested in using computer science as a tool to create practical, data-driven solutions to real-world problems. At Emory, he leads the university’s chapter of Hack4Impact, where he works with student developers to build software for nonprofit organizations. His research interests include machine learning, computer vision, and computational modeling for applications in medical imaging and the natural sciences.