Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System

Mr. Williams was previously the president and chief executive officer of the 12th District, Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco. Prior to that, he was the executive vice president and director of research for the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, which he joined in 2002.

Mr. Williams began his career as an economist in 1994, when he joined the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, following the completion of his PhD in economics at Stanford University. He became senior economist at the Board in 1998 and served on loan from 1999 to 2000 as senior economist at the White House Council of Economic Advisers. He subsequently returned to the Board, where he remained until he joined the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco.

Mr. Williams's research focuses on topics, including monetary policy under uncertainty and imperfect information, macroeconomics, learning, research and development, innovation, productivity, and business cycles. He has collaborated with economists from throughout the country and across the globe to examine economic and policy issues from different perspectives and has published numerous articles in leading research journals.

Mr. Williams has been a research associate for the Centre for Applied Macroeconomic Analysis since 2008. He was the managing editor of the International Journal of Central Banking and previously served as associate editor of the American Economic Review and the Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control. Additionally, he has been a lecturer at Stanford University's Graduate School of Business.

Prior to completing his doctorate at Stanford, Mr. Williams earned a masters of science with distinction in economics from the London School of Economics in 1989 and an AB with high distinction from the University of California at Berkeley in 1984.

He is married and has two teenage sons.