William Watkins is Director of Medical Programs and the Hong Kong Office for the Yale-China Association, a position he has held since 1996. The Yale-China Association, based in New Haven, Connecticut, and with an office in Hong Kong, has been promoting educational and medical exchanges between China and the United States since 1901. Watkins supervises the medical programs of Yale-China, which primarily link people at Hunan Medical University and Yale. Recent programs include HIV/AIDS training for Chinese nurses, a project to reduce transmission of blood-borne pathogens in hospitals, development of a curriculum in community nursing and psychiatric nursing, a fellowship program for women working in public health, research into the effects of mild iodine deficiency and rotations in Chinese hospitals for medical residents. He also oversees the teaching program, which places about 16 recent Yale graduates at schools in 4 Chinese cities, including Hong Kong.

Following his graduation from Yale in 1978 with a degree in Chinese studies, Watkins served as a Peace Corps teacher in Ghana for two years and a Yale-China teaching fellow for three years at Hunan Medical University (the former Hsiang-Ya "Hunan Yale") Medical School, founded by Yale-China in 1914). Watkins has an M.S. in microbiology from North Dakota State University and a Ph.D. in nutrition from the University of California, Davis. His training at Davis focused on nutritional and health problems in developing countries. His publications in scientific journals look particularly at the effect of nutritional deficiencies and intestinal parasites on children’s health and school performance.

He has worked in Guatemala, Peru, Indonesia, Bangladesh, and China, and has served as a consultant to the World Bank, the World Health Organizations, the United Nations Development Program, and UNICEF. In the past year he has worked in Northeastern China and Tibet in efforts to combat iodine deficiency by ensuring that salt for human consumption is properly iodized.