Amaya Williams, 21, an award-winning undergraduate student member of AACR who hoped for a career in clinical cancer research, died December 23, 2025, as the result of an automobile accident. She was 21 years old.
Williams, a resident of Covington, Georgia, was a dean’s-list senior at Albany State University in Alabama with a major in chemistry and a minor in biology. She hoped to focus her research on African-American health disparities, according to Women in Pre-Med, a campus group she helped form.
She was selected for an internship at Phoebe Putney Memorial Hospital, funded by Morehouse School of Medicine, in which she studied strategies to improve cancer screening rates. She was named a top presenter at the 2024 Annual Biomedical Research Conference for Minoritized Students (ABRCMS) in Pittsburgh for her poster entitled “The Synergistic Effects of Faith-based Engagement and Nurse Navigation in Increasing Prostate Cancer Screenings among African American Men.” She also attended the AACR Annual Meeting 2025 in Chicago, where she participated in the AACR Undergraduate Student Caucus and Poster Competition.
Williams belonged to the Kappa Alpha Kappa sorority at Albany State and was a member of the Women in Cancer Research and Minorities in Cancer Research constituency groups of AACR.
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