Dr Williams is an Associate Professor (Reader) in Computational Modelling of Complex Systems, within the Institute of Engineering, Computing and Advanced Manufacturing at the University of Cumbria. In addition, he is also an experienced IT Consultant and Project Manager following a previous career in industry with Oracle Corporation.

Dr Williams has a varied educational background, including Biochemistry (BSc Bangor & MPhil Cambridge), Computational Biology (MRes York), Computer Science (MSc Kent and PhD York), and Higher Education (PGCertAP Lancaster). He is also currently studying Psychology part-time (MSc Wolverhampton).

Dr Williams has the following professional registrations: Chartered Engineer and Professional Fellow of the British Computer Society (CITP CEng FBCS); Senior Member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (SMIEEE); Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (SFHEA); and Certified Project Management Professional (PMP) from the Project Management Institute (registration is currently Retired Status to save on annual fees). In addition, he is also, a Life Fellow of the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures, and Commerce (FRSA).

Dr Williams' primary area of research revolves around complexity in project management and the emergent behaviours and dynamics of social and socio-technical systems within organisations, with a focus on two main areas. The first, focuses on computational intelligence and computational modelling to further our understanding of the complex behaviours that emerge from these organisational systems. Within this area, he has particular interests around socio-technical complexity of software, technology and engineering project management. Due to his interdisciplinary education, he has a natural passion within the intersection of computer science, management science and life sciences (i.e., natural computing as applied to management), where he takes inspiration from the immune system to design and develop machine learning and other computational algorithms to further our understanding of project team dynamics from quantitative datasets. His second, emerging area of research, aims to develop an exciting new applied research agenda around the broad theme of project management within Industry 4.0. His intent is to use a mixed-methods approach to synthesise the variety of rich data associated with project environments and analyse through a Systems perspective, to investigate the causes, symptoms and emergent behaviours associated with ‘problem’ projects. Finally, he also has a longstanding interdisciplinary area of research around Operational Research of Health Systems, which uses a multi-method approach, including qualitative interviews and thematic analysis, quantitative surveys and statistical techniques, computational modelling and simulation-based experimentation, along with conceptual modelling and systems thinking approaches.

Dr Williams' current research portfolio into Complex Systems Analysis and Systems Engineering, is driven by real-world questions at the intersection of Computer Science and Management Science, along with Project Management of large multi-partner Software and Technology implementations. The problems faced with complex systems, such as these, requires the use of a multi-method approach, comprising qualitative data collection and analysis using Systems Thinking and Soft Systems Methodology; quantitative data collection, statistical analysis and Data Science techniques; conceptual modelling; computational modelling and simulation; and various computational intelligence techniques, such as Natural Computing, Machine Learning and Artificial Immune Systems.