Prof. Kathryn R. Williams

Dr. Williams has over 40 years’ experience teaching university-level chemistry and writing instructional materials. After completing her PhD at the Florida State University in 1972, she joined the faculty at Florida International University, where she designed the lecture and laboratory programs in inorganic and analytical chemistry. In 1979, Dr. Williams moved to the University of Florida to become the coordinator of laboratories in analytical, physical, and radiochemistry. During her teaching career, Dr. Williams wrote seven student laboratory manuals and coauthored over 50 technical publications, many of them describing new student laboratory experiments. She also produced over 20 video tapes to enhance laboratory instruction. In 1999, she became editor of the “From Past Issues” feature of the Journal of Chemical Education, for which she wrote non-technical articles on interesting or off-beat themes encountered in previous volumes of the journal. Now semi-retired from full-time teaching, Dr. Williams works as a free-lance editor of journal manuscripts, dissertations, and proposals, and she has served as the Wagener group editor since September 2008. Realizing in her advanced years that it was time to learn some synthetic techniques, in 2013 she plunged into active laboratory work. She is now a familiar figure in the Butler Polymer Research Laboratory.