Dr. Asher Williams will be joining the faculty as a tenure-track Assistant Professor in July 2023

The Department of Chemical Engineering at Columbia University is delighted to announce that Dr. Asher Williams will be joining the faculty as a tenure-track Assistant Professor in July 2023. At Columbia, her research group will harness synthetic biology, metabolic engineering, and protein engineering to study and manipulate protein-carbohydrate interactions for therapeutic and biomedical applications - including drug delivery, vaccine development, and the design of diagnostic tools to better understand and treat disease. Dr. Williams is a Trinidad and Tobago national scholar and currently a Presidential Postdoctoral Fellow at Cornell University in the group of Prof. Matthew DeLisa, where her research is aimed at cell-free biosynthesis of conjugate vaccines against emerging pathogens. She received her PhD in chemical engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 2020, co-advised by Profs. Mattheos Koffas and Robert Linhardt, focused on engineering microorganisms for the efficient biosynthesis of carbohydrate-based drugs and related enzymes. Dr. Williams was awarded RPI’s Presidential Graduate Research Fellowship, named a Class of 2020 Changemaker and an MIT Rising Star in Chemical Engineering, and is listed by Cell Mentor as one of 1000 Inspiring Black Scientists in America.