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Loren Dean Williams (born August 29th, 1955) is the director of the NASA Astrobiology Institute's Center for Ribosomal Origins and Evolution (RiboEvo) and a professor in the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, GA.

Early Life and Education
Loren Williams was born in Seattle, Washington. He earned a B.S. in Chemistry from the University of Washington in 1981 and a Ph.D. in Physical Chemistry from Duke University in 1985.

While at the University of Washington he worked in the laboratory of Martin Gouterman, contributing to one the earliest publications on the optical properties of platinum tetrabenzoporphyrins <1>. Loren Williams' Ph.D. studies focused on the thermodynamic properties of nucleic acid base pairing under the mentorship of Barbara Shaw.

Academic Life
Williams was an American Cancer Society Postdoctoral Fellow first at Duke then at Harvard. From 1988 to 1992 he was an NIH Postdoctoral fellow in the lab of Alex Rich in the Department of Biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Loren Williams joined the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry at Georgia Tech in 1992. He was promoted to Associate Professor in 1996 and to full professor in 2000.

Williams is the director of a NASA Astrobiology Institute (NAI) research Center for Ribosomal Origins and Evolution (RiboEvo). The goal of the Center is to rewind the "tape of life", to understand and recapitulate macromolecular synthesis, folding, assembly and catalysis of primordial biological systems. The Center uses biology's translation system, which contains an interpretable molecular record of the deep and distant evolutionary past, to understand biology before the Last Universal Common Ancestor (LUCA).

Honors and Awards

 * Petit Institute "Above and Beyond" Award (2012)
 * Sigma Xi Award for Best Thesis of the Year from Georgia Tech (2009-Student: Chiaolong Hsiao)
 * National Science Foundation: CAREER Award (1995-1998)
 * Sigma Xi Award for Best Paper of the Year from Georgia Tech (1997)
 * Sigma Xi Award for best paper from Georgia Tech (1996)
 * NSF CAREER Award (1995)
 * Medical Foundation/Charles A. King Trust: Postdoctoral Fellow (1991-1992)
 * National Institutes of Health: Postdoctoral Fellow (1989-1991)
 * American Cancer Society: Postdoctoral Fellow (1987-1988)
 * Phi Lambda Upsilon: Honorary Chemical Society: Duke University Chapter: President (1983-1984)

Former Students
Ph.D. Graduate Students Supervised at Georgia Tech:

Postdoctoral Associates Supervised at Georgia Tech: