Robert M. Williams was born in New York in 1953. He attended Syracuse University and received a B.A. degree in Chemistry in 1975. While at Syracuse, he did undergraduate research with Nobel Laureate Prof. Ei-ichi Negishi.

He entered the Ph.D. program at MIT and earned his Ph.D. degree in 1979 under the supervision of Prof. William H. Rastetter. His doctoral studies were concerned with the total synthesis of two fungal metabolites, gliovictin and hyalodendrin.

Dr. Williams joined the laboratories of the late Nobel Laureate Prof. R.B. Woodward at Harvard in 1979, whose postdoctoral group was subsequently managed by Professor Yoshito Kishi. There he worked on the completion of the total synthesis of erythromycin A.

After completing his postdoctoral tenure at Harvard, he joined the faculty at Colorado State University in 1980. He was promoted to Associate Professor with tenure in 1985 and Full Professor in 1988. Dr. Williams has since received several Honors and Awards, and was honored with the title of University Distinguished Professor in 2002 and the American Chemical Society Ernest Guenther Award in the Chemistry of Natural Products in 2011.

Dr. Williams research focuses on the interplay of synthetic organic chemistry, microbiology, biochemistry and molecular biology. His research interests have included the total synthesis of natural products, studies on drug-DNA interactions, design and synthesis of antibiotics and DNA-cleaving molecules, combinatorial phage libraries and biosynthetic pathways. He has utilized natural products synthesis to probe and explore biomechanistic and biosynthetic problems with a particular emphasis on antitumor and antimicrobial antibiotics. He has developed technology for the asymmetric synthesis of a-amino acids which has been commercialized by Aldrich Chemical Co. and has written a monograph on this subject.