As a graduate student at MIT, Williams was awarded the Bruno Rossi Fellowship and a Ford Foundation Predoctoral Fellowship in 2006. He received the American Astronomical Society’s Beth Brown Memorial Award in 2009. His doctoral research involved developing radio telescope instrumentation and data processing techniques to study the early universe. He was part of the team that built the Murchison Widefield Array, a low-frequency radio telescope in Western Australia designed to observe the epoch of reionization. His dissertation, titled Initial Exploration of 21-cm Cosmology with Imaging and Power Spectra from the Murchison Widefield Array, was supervised by astrophysicist Jacqueline Hewitt.[3]
Following his doctoral work, Williams completed residency training at the Harvard Medical Physics Residency Program in 2015. He later joined the faculty at Harvard Medical School as an assistant professor and clinical physicist. He worked in the Department of Radiation Oncology at Brigham and Women's Hospital and the Dana–Farber Cancer Institute, where he served as lead physicist for the institute’s MRI-guided adaptive radiation therapy program. His research focused on developing new image guidance techniques for cancer treatment.[2][4]
Williams was selected by NASA as an astronaut candidate in December 2021 and reported for training in January 2022.[4] He completed two years of initial training as part of the 2021 astronaut class.[2]
Williams launched aboard the Soyuz MS-28 spacecraft in November 2025, serving as a flight engineer and member of Expedition 73/74 to the International Space Station. He was joined by Roscosmos cosmonauts Sergey Kud-Sverchkov and Sergei Mikayev on the Soyuz flight. The mission launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan and is expected to last approximately eight months.[2] Williams also became the first person of African descent to fly on Soyuz since Arnaldo Tamayo Méndez flew on Soyuz 38 in 1980.
Personal life
Williams is married to Aubrey Samost-Williams of North Reading, Massachusetts. They have two daughters. His parents are Roger Williams and Ginger Macomber of Potomac, Maryland. He is of Panamanian descent[5]. He is an Eagle Scout, a private pilot, and enjoys hiking, camping, cooking, and traveling.[2]
This page is based on this Wikipedia article Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
