Ryan Williams is a Professor at MIT in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. Ryan got a PhD from CMU in 2007 under Manuel Blum. He was a Postdoctoral Researcher at IAS and IBM Almaden, an Assistant Professor at Stanford from 2011-2016, and an Associate Professor at MIT from 2017-2020. Ryan works in the design and analysis of efficient algorithms and computational complexity theory; in particular he studies relationships between the existence of non-trivial algorithms and proofs of complexity lower bounds. Ryan is also interested in theoretical topics that help give scientific explanations for computational phenomena, such as the unreasonable effectiveness of SAT solvers in practice.