Operational Team
Vice President, Ethics, Diversity and Inclusion
American Geophysical Union
Billy M. Williams is the Vice President for Ethics, Diversity, and Inclusion at the American Geophysical Union (AGU), a global scientific community that advances the understanding of Earth and space through cooperation in research. Williams was the Principal Investigator and lead organizer for the NSF-funded workshop in September 2016, Sexual Harassment in the Sciences: A Call to Respond and serves as a co-Principal Investigator on the 2017 NSF Grant, ADVANCE Partnership: From the Classroom to the Field: Improving the Workplace in the Geosciences. Previously, he led the work to update and extend AGU’s ethics policies. Williams was also a member of the 2017-2018 National Academy of Sciences’ Committee on Impact of Sexual Harassment in Academic Science Engineering and Medicine. Prior to joining AGU as Science Director in 2012, he served as a Senior Program Officer at the National Academy of Sciences and as a Global R&D Director at Dow Chemical Company. Williams also is the 2018-19 vice chair of the Ethics Committee for the American Society of Association Executives and co-led the development of the Societies Consortium on Addressing Harassment in STEMM – an initiative to advance professional ethics, conduct, climate and culture.