Kenneth Williams, PhD

Kenneth Williams graduated in 1971 from Boston University with a B.S. degree in Chemistry. In 1976 he received his doctoral degree in Biochemistry from the University of Vermont and then took a postdoctoral position with Dr. William Konigsberg in the Department of Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry at Yale University where he advanced up the research faculty track until he was appointed in 1989 to the level of Professor (Adjunct) Research. In 1980 he founded the W.M. Keck Foundation Biotechnology Laboratory (http://keck.med.yale.edu/) and in 2005 he founded the Yale University School of Medicine Biomedical High Performance Computing Center that has since merged into the Yale Center for Research Computing. As Director/Co-Director of the Keck Lab from 1980 through 2014 Dr. Williams wrote or trained and then helped Keck staff write 32 NIH/NSF Shared Instrumentation Grant applications with 25 (78%) of these applications being funded – with the resulting instrumentation being used to help bring state-of-the-art biotechnologies within reach of the >1,000 investigators at >200 institutions around the world who annually used the Keck Laboratory. In 1986 Dr. Williams was one of six founding members of the Association of Biomolecular Resource Facilities (ABRF, http://www.abrf.org/), an international organization “dedicated to advancing core and research biotechnology laboratories through research, communication, and education”. He was elected by international ballot to the first ABRF Executive Board in 1988 and he helped initiate and served on seven ABRF research groups and task forces. In 2000 he was PI on one of ten NIH/NIDDK Microarray Biotechnology Center grants and in 2002 he was PI on one of ten (seven-year) contracts to establish the Yale/NHLBI Proteomics Center. In 2003 he was Director of the Proteomics Core of the Northeast Center of Excellence in Biodefense. In 2004 Dr. Williams was PI on one of two grants to establish NIH/NIDA Neuroproteomics Centers. From 2004 through 2015 he was Director and since then he has been the Co-Director of the Yale/NIDA Neuroproteomics Center (https://medicine.yale.edu/keck/nida/). In his current position as Founder of the Keck Laboratory Dr. Williams’ focus is on finding new applications for Parallel Reaction Monitoring (PRM) and other key mass spectrometry technologies available from the Keck Laboratory and on helping Yale investigators to obtain the grant funding needed to bring these technologies to bear on biomedical research that recently has included uncovering protein biomarkers for delayed recovery from kidney transplants and for the early detection of ovarian cancer.