Bio - Dr. Scott L. Williams

Brief Bio of Scott L. Williams, Ph.D.

Scott grew up in Latin America (San Juan PR, Medellín, Caracas, Cuernavaca, México DF), and holds bachelor degrees in Latin American Studies, Philosophy, and Agricultural Engineering. He also has a master's degree in Mathematics, which focused on signal processing and numerical analysis.

Scott earned a Ph.D. in Plant and Environmental Sciences (formerly Agronomy & Horticulture) from New Mexico State University (NMSU), specializing in remote sensing analysis for agriculture. His dissertation showed how to separate land cover temperatures in time-delayed, bi-angular, mixed thermal samples using sub-pixel analysis. His thesis has contributed to the study of agricultural water usage by showing how to reduce the need for high resolution optics in favor of differential calculus and algebraic analysis.

While working on the doctorate, Scott established the satellite ground station for the Center for Applied Remote Sensing in Agriculture, Meteorology, and Environment (CARSAME) at NMSU, which reads direct satellite broadcasts. Upon graduation, Scott became research faculty in the College of Agriculture at NMSU.

Prior to the Ph.D. program, Scott spent 25 years working/contracting as an analyst/engineer with research laboratories (Los Alamos, Sandia, Cold Spring Harbor), universities (Arizona, Rice, and NMSU), and a few startup companies. These involved cutting edge applications, such as the Genome Project, cellular optical tweezers, and solar system planetary imaging.

Scott also founded a company based on products of his own design and construction which inspected semiconductor wafers for defects using machine vision and robotics. These products were used for quality control by Intel, Motorola, and Hewlett-Packard and set an industry standard for wafer probe mark analysis.

Scott's current focus is in computational agriculture applications, ranging from remote sensing to weather modeling to fablab manufacturing. His intentions are to propagate open-source applications of agricultural software/hardware through education and practice. Brief Resume