Career Biography:
Tony Williams earned a Bachelor of Science (Hons) in
Mathematical Physics in
1980 and then a Bachelor of
Electrical Engineering
(Hons) in 1981, both at the
University of Adelaide.
He then shifted to The Flinders University of South
Australia where, in 1985, he was awarded his Ph.D. degree in
Theoretical
Physics for his thesis, "Soliton bags in quantum field theory".
His first postdoctoral position was working with Prof. Tony Thomas in the
Theoretical Physics group at the University of Adelaide from 1984-86.
Following this he moved to the U.S. to work with the
Nuclear Theory group
in the
Department of Physics
at the
University of Washington
in Seattle,
where he was a postdoctoral research associate for three years from 1986-89.
The department is also host to the
National Institute
for Nuclear Theory which is supported by the (U.S.) Department
of Energy.
In August 1989 he began work as an Assistant Professor at
Florida State
University in
Tallahassee, Florida,
where he had a joint appointment in the
Department
of Physics and in the Supercomputer Computations Research Institute
(SCRI), which has now evolved into the
School of Computational Science and Information Technology (CSIT). In
August 1993 he was promoted to Associate Professor at FSU.
He was elected a Fellow of the
Australian Institute of Physics in 1992.
In January 1993 he took a one-year leave of absence from Florida State
University to undertake a position at the
University of Adelaide
as a Lecturer. He elected to remain
in Adelaide, but maintains ties
with Florida State University.
In January 1995 he was promoted to Senior
Lecturer at the University of Adelaide.
He is Deputy Director and co-founder (with Prof. Tony Thomas, Director)
of the Special Research Centre for the Subatomic
Structure of Matter (CSSM). The CSSM commenced operations
in 1997 and is a 9 year Special Research Centre funded by
the Australian Research Council.
He was promoted to Associate Professor
in January 1998.
He was Chair of the
Nuclear and Particle Physics Group (NUPP)
of the
Australian Institute of Physics from 1997-2000.
He was Chair of the Organizing Committee for the
14th National Congress of the Australian Institute of Physics
(AIP2000) in December 2000, which had over 680 registered participants.
He is founding Director of the
South Australian Partnership for
Advanced Computing (SAPAC). SAPAC is an unincorporated joint
venture of the three South Australian universities: the University
of Adelaide, Flinders University, and the University of South Australia.
SAPAC commenced operations in September 2002.
SAPAC grew in part from the Centre for High-Performance Computing
and Applications, which was a University of Adelaide Research Centre
that Tony founded in 2001. Here is a brief story and photograph
scanned from a
local paper and
(with poor resolution) from a
national newspaper.
He is also currently Deputy Director of the
National Institute for Theoretical Physics
(NITP). He was Deputy Head of the
Department of Physics and Mathematical Physics from 2000-2002.
In 2001 he was awarded the
Walter Boas Medal by the
Australian Institute of Physics
for his research.
In October 2002 he was elected as the first
Fellow
of the
American Physical Society
in the newly formed
Topical Group in Hadron Physics (GHP).
He was elected Chair of the
Board of the Australian Institute for
High-Energy Physics (AUSHEP) in October 2002.
He was promoted to the position of Professor in the
Department of
Physics and Mathematical Physics in July 2003.
