Dr. Williams joined Divergence in 2000 to implement the Company’s bioinformatics and target gene discovery efforts. He has overseen the development of the Company’s strategies in genomics, functional validation using RNA interference, and chemistry, and is a co-inventor on several dozen patents and patent applications held by Divergence and its collaborators. He is the company’s liaison to its intellectual property counsel, Fish and Richardson. As Vice President of Discovery Research he oversees the company’s discovery efforts which include several chemical and transgenic projects in nematode control. Prior to joining Divergence, Dr. Williams was a post-doctoral fellow in the Department of Biochemistry at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. Dr. Williams received a Ph.D. in Molecular Biophysics from Washington University where he worked with Dr. Kathleen Hall on the application of computational methods - continuum solvation and stochastic dynamics models - to analyze the effects of mutations on the thermodynamics and structure of RNA hairpins. At Washington University, Dr Williams twice held the Gerty T. Cori Sigma Chemical Company Fellowship. He received his B.A. in Biochemistry and French from Swarthmore College where he was also a Pew Minority Fellow.
