Ruth J. Williams

Ruth J. Williams is Distinguished Professor of Mathematics and holds the Charles Lee Powell Professor in Mathematics I at the University of California, San Diego. She is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and a Corresponding Member of the Australian Academy of Science. Her research is focused on probability, stochastic processes and their applications. She is especially well known for her work on theory and applications associated with stochastic networks, which arise in semiconductor manufacturing, telecommunications, computer systems, Internet congestion control and systems biology. She developed a systematic approach to proving diffusion approximations for multiclass queueing networks and pioneered analyses of processor sharing queues and flow level models of Internet congestion control. Williams is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Mathematical Society, the Institute of Mathematical Statistics, the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics and the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences.  She has been a U.S. National Science Foundation Presidential Young Investigator, an Alfred P. Sloan Fellow, and a Guggenheim Fellow. Among her awards, Williams is a winner of the John von Neumann Theory Prize (2016). She was President of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics in 2011-12, a major professional society for those doing research in probability and statistics.