| Christopher Williams | |||||||||||||
| Birth Name: | Christopher Leigh Williams | ||||||||||||
| Birth Place: | New York City, New York, U.S. | ||||||||||||
| Education: | Stanford University (BS) Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MS, PhD) | ||||||||||||
| Type: | NASA astronaut | ||||||||||||
| Selection: | NASA Group 23 (2021) | ||||||||||||
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Christopher Leigh Williams is an American medical physicist and NASA astronaut. He resides in Boston, Massachusetts.
Williams grew up in Potomac, Maryland. He graduated Montgomery Blair High School, Silver Spring, Maryland in 2001. He graduated from Stanford University in 2005 with a bachelor's degree in physics and a doctorate in physics from MIT in 2012, where his research was in astrophysics. Williams is a board-certified medical physicist,completing his residency training at Harvard Medical School before joining the faculty as a clinical physicist and researcher.[1]
Before his Ph.D., Williams worked at the United States Naval Research Laboratory and NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, as well as volunteered as an EMT and firefighter for the Rockville Volunteer Fire Department serving Montgomery County, Maryland.[2] He most recently worked as a medical physicist in the Radiation OncologyDepartment at the Brigham and Women's Hospital and Dana-Farber CancerInstitute in Boston. He was the lead physicist for the Institute'sMRI-guided adaptive radiation therapy program. His research focused ondeveloping image guidance techniques for cancer treatments.[3] [1]
On December 6, 2021, Williams was selected to join NASA Astronaut Group 23 candidate class.